The Court and the Old Dominion: Judicial Review Among the Virginia Jeffersonians

Over the past 30 years, a growing amount of scholarly attention has been paid to forms of constitutional interpretation other than judicial review, ranging from departmentalism to explicitly removing judicial review from the court's purview. As many of these works have recognized, such skepticism is not new, but has a strong historical tradition. What has not often been noted, however, is that differing conceptions of judicial revieweven opposition to judicial oversight of legislative actionsexisted nearly from the moment that Marbury v. Madison was decided. This article examines some of these divergent opinions on judicial review in the Early Republic by studying how it was perceived by the Old Republicans, the conservative faction of the Virginia Jeffersonians.