Tracing the development of the United States through the key Supreme Court decisions from Marbury v. Madison to Bush v. Gore, this course focuses on the power center at the other end of the Avenue instead of the White House.  John Marshall, not Jefferson, laid the groundwork for the modern American nation by articulating decidedly non-Jeffersonian concepts in Marbury and McCulloch. Earl Warren, not Congress or the President, implemented the Second Reconstruction through Brown v. Board of Education.  Warren Burger toppled a vast criminal enterprise operated out of the Oval Office by saying, in essence, the emperor has no executive privilege clothes (United States v. Nixon).  Other issues include the Commerce Power; the constitutional twilight zone (Presidential warmaking short of war); the Court’s foray into intra-branch warfare (which led to FDR’s Court-Packing Plan); the Court’s employment of the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to cut the Gordian knot of racial apartheid, and also to create “penumbral” constitutional rights found nowhere in the text of the document.