We were walking down M Street in Georgetown this weekend past the Ukranian Embassy and wondered whether stress levels inside the embassy have reduced since the electoral troubles in Ukraine sort of subsided over the weekend. Perhaps the embassy crew joined some drunken Hoya undergrads on the way home from Rhino Bar for cheesesteaks at Philadelphia Cheesesteak Factory across the street when they realized that the threat of armed civil conflict back home was waning. We’ll see what Yushchenko and Yanukovich have planned for this week, now that Leonid Kuchma has criticized the Ukranian supreme court’s decision to intervene in the electoral dispute.

The Urkanian Embassy, if you didn’t know, holds an interesting place in American history. According to the AIA Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C., the building at 3350 M St. NW was the home of then-Georgetown Mayor Uriah Forrest, who in March of 1791 gathered area landowners — at the request of George Washington — to convince them building the capital city on the banks of Potomac River was in their interest.

And to all you first-year law students out there preparing for exams, this is the house that William Marbury (of Marbury v. Madison fame) bought in 1800. But Forrest’s house was too small, and the Marburys added onto it. Now Ukraine is the steward of one of the home of one of the most important figures in one of the most important legal cases in American judicial history.