The New Deal and the United States Supreme Court

1936 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 238
Author(s):  
F. R. Coudert
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
New Deal ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
The New Deal

Moral Philosophy, the United States Supreme Court, and the Nation’s Character, 1860–1910

1997 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Warren Bailey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
New Deal ◽  
United States Supreme Court ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
United States Supreme ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Laissez Faire

The charge that the United States Supreme Court exercised a conservative influence upon the nation’s constitutional life during the period from 1864 to 1938 is impossible to refute. The Supreme Court during the period from the end of the Civil War to the New Deal era has been portrayed as having largely abdicated its obligation to protect society’s common interests in favour of a laissez-faire constitutionalism reflecting the social and political views of new and powerful economic interests. The judicial conservatism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries conflicted with the political ideals of Progressives and with the direction taken by American policy-makers since the acceptance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. Historians have labelled the Court’s laissez-faire conservative style as undesirable, if not consciously immoral.Nevertheless, the problem of understanding the ideas which lay at the foundation of judicial conservatism should be addressed. General legal historians have preferred to begin and end their inquiries into early influences on the judicial mind with a short overview of legal education and leave aside the possible influence of college studies. In recent years, historians have broadened their investigations of the intellectual underpinnings of late nineteenth-century legal thought in an attempt to provide the sort of synthetic account of legal thought suggested by Perry Miller’s Life of the Mind—a work which attempts to connect the thought of leading members of the bar to intellectual currents outside the legal sphere. The result has been a limited rehabilitation of the Supreme Court’s reputation during the Gilded Age.

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