If the court can not come to Chase

Cliff Sloan and David McKean have written The Great Decision, a book about the Supreme Court's decision in Marbury v. Madison. The subtitle portentously speaks of "Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court."

But what the book adds are matters interstitial to the main line of the narrative, a main line that is after all fairly well known already to the sort of folks who would consider reading such a book.

I like the bit about Samuel Chase and the gout. Chase suffered from that affliction so badly in February 1803 that he could not hobble the short distance from Stelle's Hotel, where he was staying, to the Capitol, where the court was meeting.

Meanwhile, Justice Cushing was ill in Massachusetts and Justice Moore was apparently also ailing and absent. So Chief Justice Marshall could not get a quorum.

What did he do? He moved the site of the meetings to the lobby of Stelle's. Chase could thus attend.

But by the morning of February 24, when the result in Marbury was announced to the world, Moore too had recovered sufficiently so that he could attend, so everyone other than Cushing was there in the lobby of the Hotel. In addition to Chase, Moore, and Marshall, there was Bushrod Washington, the nephew of the First President (and thus the cousin of his country?), and William Paterson.

A neat anecdote, though if you want some broader resonance to it you may have to look elsewhere. Gout is gout, not a symbol of constitutional crises or of their resolution.