That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post. Here’s how it opens:
In “The Kidney Stones that Made John Marshall Chief Justice,” I discussed three fortuitous events that led to John Adams’s decision to nominate John Marshall as Chief Justice. Another factor that played an intriguing role was a provision of the bill pending in Congress that would become the Judiciary Act of 1801. That provision—section 3 of the Act—would reduce the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five.
Two of the scholars whose work I drew on in my previous post—historian Kathryn Turner and Marshall biographer Jean Edward Smith—have offered competing accounts of how section 3 affected Adams’s thinking. Disagreeing with both, I’ll advance my own theory.
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