It is the most important case the Supreme Court ever decided, and it started with a stack of job letters that never got delivered.
In his last hours in office in 1801, the defeated President John Adams rushed to pack the courts with judges from his own party, the so-called midnight judges. The commissions were signed and sealed, but in the chaos of the handover, a batch of them never went out the door. One belonged to a man named William Marbury.
The new president, Thomas Jefferson, was furious at the court-packing and ordered his Secretary of State, James Madison, to simply withhold the undelivered commissions. Marbury sued to force delivery, and the case landed before Chief Justice John Marshall.
Marshall was in an impossible spot. He was a Federalist, like Marbury, and had actually been the one who sealed the commission. If he ordered Jefferson to deliver it, Jefferson would surely ignore him, exposing the young Court as powerless. If he caved, the Court looked weak anyway.
Marshall's escape was a stroke of genius. He ruled that yes, Marbury deserved his commission, but that the specific law Marbury used to sue was itself unconstitutional, so the Court could not act. In losing the case, Marbury handed Marshall a far greater prize: the Court had just declared, for the first time, that it could strike down an act of Congress.
