⚖️The Greats

Marbury was a trap Marshall built and escaped in one move. William Marbury sued to force delivery of his judicial commission; ruling for him invited President Jefferson to simply ignore the Court, ruling against him looked like surrender. Marshall held Marbury legally entitled to the commission and the administration in the wrong — then ruled the statute under which Marbury had sued unconstitutional, so the Court could not order the remedy. Jefferson won the case; the Court walked away with the power to strike down laws, in a judgment leaving nothing to defy.

As a young magistrate of Tianchang county, Bao heard a farmer complain that someone had cut out his ox's tongue in the night. Bao told him to go home, slaughter the ox and sell the meat — technically illegal, since working oxen were protected. When a neighbour promptly appeared to denounce the farmer for illegal slaughter, Bao asked him why he had cut out the animal's tongue and then come to inform on the man he had wronged. The informer confessed. The case, recorded in the History of Song, seeded a millennium of Judge Bao detective stories.

In 1946, a new High Court judge of 47, Denning decided a case about a Blitz-emptied London block of flats whose landlord had accepted half rent through the war and then demanded the difference. Orthodox doctrine said the promise to take less was unenforceable — nothing had been given in exchange. Denning revived a neglected 1877 House of Lords dictum and held that a promise intended to be relied on, and actually relied on, binds. High Trees created modern promissory estoppel and is cited across the common-law world to this day.

In 2007 the Supreme Court threw out Lilly Ledbetter's pay-discrimination case because she had not sued within 180 days of the first unequal paycheck — years before she could have known of it. Ginsburg read her dissent aloud from the bench, a rare act of protest, saying plainly that "the ball is in Congress's court." Congress took the hint: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, restarting the clock with every discriminatory paycheck, became the first bill President Obama signed into law, on 29 January 2009.

In July 1984 Tommaso Buscetta, the first senior mafioso to turn, agreed to talk — but only to Falcone, and opened with a warning: first they will try to kill me, then it will be your turn, until they succeed. Falcone took the depositions anyway and corroborated every claim against bank records, flight manifests and land registries before using it, building an indictment of over 8,000 pages. On 23 May 1992 a bomb of roughly 500 kilograms under the Capaci motorway killed Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo — herself a judge — and three police escorts.

At the Rwanda tribunal, Pillay sat on the three-judge chamber trying Jean-Paul Akayesu, mayor of Taba commune. When witnesses began spontaneously describing mass rapes, the judges' own questioning led prosecutors to amend the indictment. The judgment of 2 September 1998 delivered the first international conviction for genocide ever entered — and ruled, for the first time anywhere, that systematic rape committed to destroy a group is itself an act of genocide, permanently changing how tribunals treat sexual violence in war.

Beevi entered the Kerala subordinate judiciary as a munsiff in 1958, when women were scarce even at the bar, and rose through thirty years of unglamorous work — trial courts, tax tribunals, the Kerala High Court — before the Supreme Court called in October 1989, months after she had formally retired. Asked late in life about her legacy, she put it simply: "I opened the door." In 1997 she became Governor of Tamil Nadu, one more first for a Muslim woman in Indian public life.