America’s ‘Great Chief Justice’ Was an Unrepentant Slaveholder
John Marshall is America’s most important jurist. Biographers are universally laudatory of the “Great Chief Justice.” A recent documentary about him (in which I am interviewed) is subtitled The Man Who Made the Supreme Court.This icon of jurisprudence is central to America’s constitutional development. For nearly three and a half decades, longer than any other chief justice, he led the Court and shaped constitutional law.