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Book Review, Thomas B. Mcaffee

Scholarly Works

Chief Justice Marshall's legendary opinion in Marbury v. Madison has always been the centerpiece of debate over the legitimacy and scope of the power of judicial review. Unsurprisingly, then, Robert Lowry Clinton's thesis that recent arguments about the judicial power reflect a modem revisionism centers on the claim that the famous opinion has been pervasively misunderstood in modem scholarly thought. Clinton's Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review develops the view that Marbury was written to defend a very limited defensive power of courts to disregard statutes that conflict with constitutional provisions that directly govern the judicial function. The modem view …