were determined to create a new polity in which the government derived its moral authority from the will of the people and its parameters from the constitution. Governments were constrained from encroaching on the constitutive rights of its citizens, but if they did, there was an independent judiciary to keep those rights safe. The institutional arrangements at the heart of this new, American democracy, therefore, provided that the will of the people as reflected in their elected representatives, was subject to the will of the constitution, as reflected in the decisions of an independent judiciary. Notwithstanding the formulization and constitutionalization of these democratic aspirations in the United States, however, it cannot be said that the actual implementation met with universal enthusiasm. The elites who debated their way to a Bill of Rights were far more comfortable as drafters than they were, once elected to government office, as recipients of their own rhetoric. When John Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the American Supreme Court, rendered his dramatic judgment in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, boldly asserting the court's right to invalidate unconstitutional legislation, he started the first Act of what has turned out to be a very long-running play whose opening words are "To defer or not to defer, that is question ..." Ironically, it would be many years in the United States before these judicial muscles were again so strenuously flexed as to knock out legislative action, but when they were, as they routinely were earlier in the twentieth