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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Court-Packing And Compromise, Barry Cushman
Court-Packing And Compromise, Barry Cushman
Journal Articles
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1937 Court-packing bill would have permitted him to appoint six additional justices to the Supreme Court, thereby expanding its membership to fifteen immediately. Throughout the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to enact the measure, Roosevelt was presented with numerous opportunities to compromise for a measure authorizing the appointment of fewer additional justices. The President rejected each of these proposals, and his refusal to compromise often has been attributed to stubbornness, overconfidence, or hubris. Yet an examination of the papers of Attorney General Homer S. Cummings reveals why FDR and his advisors believed that he required no fewer than …
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 …
Imagining The Past And Remembering The Future: The Supreme Court's History Of The Establishment Clause, Gerard V. Bradley
Imagining The Past And Remembering The Future: The Supreme Court's History Of The Establishment Clause, Gerard V. Bradley
Journal Articles
Our Framers through the Establishment Clause sought to prevent the government from preferring one religious sect to another. However, the Supreme Court in Everson v. Board of Education abandoned that meaning of nonestablishment and created a general prohibition on all nondiscriminatory aid to religion, a decision later reinforced in Lemon v. Kurtzman. This Article discusses the Founder’s worldview and looks at other Establishment Clause cases to illustrate that the historical evidence is inconsistent with Everson. Rather, the founders intended to assure that religion would be aided only on a nondiscriminatory, or sect-neutral, basis and does not stand for …