Life tenure, modified by good behavior, is a superb device for assuring judicial independence and protection of individual rights. With a view toward creating a judiciary that would constitute a balance against Congress, the Convention provided for the independence of the courts from Congress. Hamilton, therefore, praises the Constitution for establishing courts that are separated from Congress. He is pleased to note that to this organizational independence there is added a financial one. Another factor contributing to the independence of the judiciary is the judges' right to hold office during good behavior.
Judicial review is another barrier against too much democracy.
Exercised by state courts before the Federal Convention met, and taken for granted by the majority of the members of the Convention, as well as by the ratifying conventions in the states, judicial review is expounded by Hamilton as a doctrine reaching a climax and a conclusion in this Federalist paper. To be more concrete, when Hamilton considers the judiciary both as a barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body and as the citadel of public justice, i.e., the citadel for the protection of the individual's life, liberty, and property, he states that judicial review means a curb on the legislature's encroachments upon individual rights. Parallel to every denial of legislative power in essay seventy-eight goes an assertion of vested rights. Although he considers a power-concentration in the legislature as despotism, Hamilton does not perceive a strong judiciary as a threat to free government. He admits that individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts, but he is emphatic in adding that the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter.