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Constitutional Adjucation: The Who And When, Henry Paul Monaghan

Faculty Scholarship

When the newly appointed Justices of the Supreme Court assembled in the Royal Exchange Building in New York for their first session on February 2, 1790, the most farsighted individual could not have foreseen what the future held for this tribunal. Now less than a generation short of its 200th anniversary, the Court is universally acknowledged to be the final and authoritative expositor of the Constitution. Yet after almost two centuries, questions concerning this power of the Court to interpret the Constitution remain. The first set of questions centers on the substantive standards for constitutional adjudication. The second, with which …