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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
The Court-Packing Plan As Symptom, Casualty, And Cause Of Gridlock, Barry Cushman
The Court-Packing Plan As Symptom, Casualty, And Cause Of Gridlock, Barry Cushman
Journal Articles
This essay, prepared for the Notre Dame Law Review's Symposium, “The American Congress: Legal Implications of Gridlock,” considers three ways in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 Court-packing bill was related to the phenomenon of gridlock in the 1930s. First, as FDR's public remarks on the subject demonstrate, he believed that the early New Deal was a victim of partisan gridlock between the Democrat-controlled political branches and the Republican-controlled judiciary. Moreover, he did not believe that the impasse could be overcome through an amendment to the Constitution, for he regarded Article V's supermajority requirements as virtually encoding gridlock into the …