The Emergence of the Judiciary

In the massive rethinking that took place in the 1780s and 1790s nearly all parts of America’s governments were reformed and reconstituted, but the institution that was most transformed was the judiciary. In the colonial period judges had been largely seen as the much scorned and insignificant appendage of crown authority. In the several decades following the Declaration of Independence they had become an equal and independent part of the modern tripartite federal and state governments with the authority to declare void acts of the legislatures that violated the constitutions. This power, later called judicial review, developed slowly and haltingly, for it seemed to many to violate the legislative authority of the people. But changing ideas of representation helped to make sense of the transformation.