The U.S. Supreme Court—unlike the highest courts in 10 American states and in many foreign countries—cannot rule on abstract questions of law, only on actual controversies between actual litigants. Often those litigants represent thousands, even millions, in similar circumstances—children attending racially segregated schools, or same-sex couples who want to marry. But in the first case of continuing importance that the Court decided, the ruling came on a problem affecting four persons. And in the greater scheme the problem wasn't even very consequential.
Nonetheless, the 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison arguably matters as much as any the tribunal has handed down. Marbury set out the very way this country's legal system works and through legal legerdemain avoided a potentially perilous conflict.
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