This doctrine would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions. It would declare that an act, which according to the principles and theory of our government is entirely void, is yet in practice completely obligatory.... It would be giving the Legislature a practical and real omnipotence with the same breath which professes to restrict their powers within narrow limits. That it thus reduces to nothing what we have deemed the greatest improvement on political institutions,—a written constitution,—would of itself be sufficient, in America, where written constitutions have been viewed with so much reverence, for rejecting the construction. But the peculiar expressions of the Constitution of the United States furnish additional arguments in favor of its rejection.[273] The conclusion of the whole matter is: Thus the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.[274] 112. The federal (or the State) judiciary, while final judge of what the law is, is not the judge of what the law should be: such action would be a violation of judicial functions and an assumption of legislative functions.[275] The court in saying what the law is, that is, what it means, does not attempt to say what the law should be, that is, to make the law. Therefore it is perilous, as likely to embarrass the court, for the court to be subject to the call of the executive, or the legislative, to give an opinion “upon important questions of law, and upon solemn occasions.”[276] The peril lies in possible confusion of governmental functions, or, to use the constitutional term, “offices.” The American people have delegated judicial power to the courts: the people of the several States to their State courts; the people of the United States, to the federal courts; and “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” 113. This province the American judiciary occupies, this duty it performs, with the result that it holds a unique place in political history. At no other time, among no other people, in no other form of government has the judiciary executed the office it executes in the American system of government. It is the consciousness of the American people that law must rest upon justice and reason, that the constitution is a more ultimate formulation of the fundamental principles of justice and reason than mere legislative acts, and that the judiciary is a better interpreter of these fundamental principles than the Legislature,—it is this consciousness which has given such authority to the interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court.[277] Yet,—so remarks the Supreme Court itself,—