The Supreme Court’s immense prestige in modern times is often traced back to John Marshall, and his decision in the Marbury case that so broadened the Court’s role as an arbiter of national powers. Actually, its foundations were laid at least a quarter century before, in 1780, when a federal Court of Appeal was established under the Articles of Confederation to settle disputes over the disposition of ships taken as prizes. This body heard sixty-five cases before it met for the last time—in Philadelphia, in May of 1787— two days after another group of men assembled in the same city to establish a new and broader national judiciary as part of a new system of government.

Arguments still rage over the precise structure and scope the members of the Constitutional Convention intended to give to the federal court system that emerged from their secret sessions. The language of the Constitution is general:

“The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. … The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties …” (From Sections 1 and 2, Article III)

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties … shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” (From Article VI)

These broad definitions caused many who read the proposed Constitution to worry that the federal courts might become too powerful. “There are no well defined limits of the Judiciary powers,” said Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a drafter of the Constitution who had refused to sign the final document. By contrast, others among the Founding Fathers—Alexander Hamilton, for example—looked unhappily on the judiciary as “beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power.”

Many of the judiciary’s precise functions and powers remained to be defined by the first Congress assembled under the ratified Constitution, and in the Judiciary Act of 1789 Congress did so. Though this act was partially voided by Marshall in the Marbury case, it still stands—along with the broad wording of the Constitution—as the main basis and definition of the federal judiciary’s authority.

Among the provisions of the act was one creating a chief justice for the Court, and Washington named John Jay as the first man to fill the post. This versatile statesman from New York presided over the Court’s first session, held on February 1, 1790, in the Royal Exchange Building in Manhattan. After two short terms there, Jay and his colleagues followed the rest of the government to Philadelphia. Here the Court stayed for nearly ten years, quartered most of the