Eighteenth- and 19th-century contemporaries believed Marshall to be, if not the equal of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, at least very close to that pantheon. "John Marshall: The Final Founder" demonstrates that not only can Marshall be considered one of those Founding Fathers, but that what he did as the Chief Justice was not just significant, but the glue that held the union together after the original founding days. The Supreme Court met in the basement of the new Capitol building in Washington when Marshall took over, which is just about what the executive and legislative branches thought of the judiciary. "John Marshall: The Final Founder" advocates a change in the view of when the "founding" of the United States ended. That has long been thought of in one or the other of the signing of the Constitution, the acceptance of the Bill of Rights or the beginning of the Washington presidency. The Final Founder pushes that forward to the peaceful change of power from Federalist to Democrat-Republican and, especially, Marshall's singular achievement -- to move the Court from the basement and truly make it Supreme.

Robert Strauss has been a reporter at Sports Illustrated; a feature writer for the Philadelphia Daily News; a news and sports producer for KYW-TV, then the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, and the TV critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Asbury Park Press. For the last two decades, he has been a freelance journalist, his most prominent client being the New York Times, where he has had more than 1000 by-lines. He has taught non-fiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania since 1999 and been an adjunct professor at Temple University, the University of Delaware and St. Joseph's University as well. He is the author of Worst. President. Ever. among other books. He lives in Haddonfield, New Jersey.