Constitutional Law in 1934–35

In the 1934 term, the Supreme Court came to grips with some of the major constitutional problems of the New Deal and rendered decisions more intimately affecting our national life than any since the Dred Scott case of 1857. The great slavery decision rocked the nation to its foundations by its futile attempt to solve a problem insoluble by any means save war. The important constitutional decisions of the Reconstruction period in their immediate consequences affected mainly the South, and it will be remembered that by a series of side-steppings, some involuntary and some not, the Supreme Court escaped the necessity of passing squarely upon the validity of the basic program of Reconstruction as embodied in the act of 1867. Forty years ago, in its 1894 term, the Court incurred much unpopularity by three decisions of major significance. It invalidated the Income Tax Act passed in fulfillment of Democratic campaign pledges; it emasculated, temporarily at least, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by holding it inapplicable to a most obvious and vicious monopoly—the sugar trust; and it incurred the hostility of organized labor by sustaining the issuance by a federal court of a labor injunction. None of these decisions was, however, nor were all of them together, as far-reaching in significance as those handed down in the last term of Court.