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The Supreme Court and the New Deal

The public had the opportunity through electoral democracy in the 1930s to reshape only two of the three branches of government. Armed with the judge-made weapon of judicial review and shielded by the doctrine of stare decisis, federal judges tenured during good behavior constituted "the most formidable barrier to the New Deal." 21 After twelve years of Republican control, the federal courts were filled with judges schooled in legal formalism and committed to a conservative political philosophy. The 140 federal judges appointed by Roosevelt's three Republican predecessors made up three-fourths of the district court bench and two-thirds of the appellate bench when Roosevelt took office.

The far-reaching Judiciary Act of 1925 had done much to enhance the policy- making role of the Supreme Court. This measure, which was the most important piece of judicial legislation passed in the twentieth century, continued the process begun in the Judiciary Act of 1891 of allowing the Supreme Court to concentrate its energies on constitutionally or nationally significant issues. The act was maneuvered through Congress by then Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who, more than any other chief justice in the Court's history, fulfilled his administrative role energetically. The measure entailed a "drastic transfer of existing Supreme Court business to the circuit courts of appeal."22 It provided that appeals from most district court decisions would be shunted to the circuit courts of appeals, whose decisions, in most instances, were to be final. The only notable exceptions were cases of national importance, such as those involving interstate commerce or antitrust statutes, suits to enjoin enforcement of either Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) orders or state laws, and appeals by the federal government in criminal cases. Supreme Court review was made overwhelmingly discretionary through the writ of certiorari, which gave the Court significant control over its docket. In sum, the Judiciary Act of 1925 was still another example of the attempt by lawmakers to bring coherence and consistency to the federal legal system.

The Supreme Court was, if anything, a bit more sharply divided in its political and ideological composition than was the federal judiciary as a whole. The conservative wing of the Court was composed of the so-called Four Horsemen (Justices Willis Van Devanter [ 1911-1937], James McReynolds [ 1914-1941], George Sutherland [ 1922- 1938], and Pierce Butler [ 1922-1939]), named after the ancient horsemen of the apocalypse. On the other wing were three generally liberal justices: Benjamin N. Cardozo ( 1932-1938), Louis D. Brandeis ( 1916-1939), and Harlan Fiske Stone ( 1925-1941). Between the two wings was the chief justice, Charles Evans Hughes ( 1930-1941) and the mercurial Owen J. Roberts ( 1930-1945).

 


Date: 2015-01-29; view: 668


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