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The Grand Convention - The Supreme Law of the Land
The branch that today holds the power to strike down acts of Congress was born without a fight — “that a national Judiciary be established,” agreed unanimously, in a morning. Then the Constitutional Convention spent a summer on the two questions hiding inside the easy answer. This is the story of the courts: Franklin’s Scottish lawyers, who always nominated the ablest man to the bench in order to divide his practice; the “may, not shall” finesse that mailed the fight over lower courts to the future; the two locks — tenure and salary — that put judges beyond the reach of the politicians they…
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