MARBURY V. MADISON overturned a section of a law passed by Congress. This was no novelty, either in theory or in practice. “Whenever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution,” Alexander Hamilton had written in Federalist 78, “it will be the duty of the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former.” Marshall himself, in his speech on the judiciary at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, had said that if Congress made a law that infringed on the Constitution, judges “would declare it void.”
Richard Brookhiser in John Marshall