Note 269 — ARTICLE III (continued 2)

This phase of judicial review is described by Justice Sutherland as follows: "From the authority to ascertain and determine the law in a given case, there necessarily results, in case of conflict, the duty to declare and enforce the rule of the supreme law and reject that of an inferior act of legislation which, transcending the Constitution, is of no effect and binding on no one. This is not the exercise of a substantive power to review and nullify acts of Congress, for no such substantive power exists. It is simply a necessary concomitant of the power to hear and dispose of a case or controversy properly before the court, to the determination of which must be brought the test and measure of the law." Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525, 544 (1923). In United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 62 (1936), Justice Roberts for the Court reduced judicial review to very simple terms when he declared that when an act is challenged as being unconstitutional, "the judicial branch of the Government has only one duty,—to lay the article of the Constitution which is invoked beside the statute which is challenged and to decide whether the latter squares with the former."