The story of Article III of the United States Constitution, the judiciary of the United States and other elements central to the legal system are in many ways the story of American constitutionalism itself. The story has a beginning but no end of it is fraught with tension, uncertainty and ambivalence. Article III of the Constitution defines and the limits the judicial power of the United States. It is intended to guarantee an independent federal judiciary and its first section provides that federal judges shall enjoy tenure during good behaviour. Section 2 of the article enumerates the categories of cases in which a federal court either may or must have jurisdiction. Section 3 defines the crime of treason.
Although Article III purposely establishes the judicial branch as the political of the legislative and executive branches established by Articles I and II, the framers plans the judicial power were beset with ambivalence. At the Constitutional Convention, all agreed that there should be one Supreme Court in Article III provides in mandatory terms for the tribunal's establishment. But the framers, some of whom feared that the federal courts would intrude excessively on the state's lawmaking prerogatives, divided sharply over whether there should be any lower federal courts at all. The dispute ended in a compromise, under which Article III allows Congress the power to create lower federal courts but does not require it to do so. It is a corollary of the so-called Madisonian compromise to the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts that are subject to congressional limitation.
Even the Constitutional provision for the Supreme Court power is surprisingly laconic and apparently compromised. Article III subjects the courts to appellate jurisdiction under such exceptions and regulations as the Congress shall make. To some commentators and critics, is also striking that Article III nowhere provides expressly for the power of judicial review which is the court's power to assess the constitutionality of the State and Federal legislation presented to it. Some framers, most noticeably Alexander Hamilton in the federalist papers at number 78 argued for the existence of this extraordinary power. But because Article III never mentions judicial review explicitly the debate is perennial over whether judicial review was intended and what its scope should be.
Viewed solely as a text, this article was determines very little. It affords the potential for what has in fact developed as perhaps the most powerful judicial system in the history of the world. But the words of the article are also consistent with a relatively insignificant federal judiciary, possibly without the power of judicial review and with a federal court's jurisdiction delimited by Congress to protect claimed congressional and executive prerogatives. It is often argued by scholars that the power of the Federal government in United States has been expanded far beyond what the framers of the Constitution ever intended.
