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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The “Progressive” Peril, Michael Allan Wolf
Looking Backward: Richard Epstein Ponders The “Progressive” Peril, Michael Allan Wolf
Michael A Wolf
In "How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution," Richard Epstein bemoans the growth of a dominant big government. How Progressives should receive a warm reception from the audience, lawyers and laypeople alike, who view the New Deal as a mistake of epic proportions. For the rest of us, significant gaps will still remain between, on the one hand, our understanding of the nation’s past and of the complex nature of constitutional lawmaking and, on the other, Epstein’s version of the nature of twentieth-century reform and Progressive jurisprudence.
Nineteenth Century Interpretations Of The Federal Contract Clause: The Transformation From Vested To Substantive Rights Against The State , James L. Kainen
Nineteenth Century Interpretations Of The Federal Contract Clause: The Transformation From Vested To Substantive Rights Against The State , James L. Kainen
James L. Kainen
During the early nineteenth century, the contract clause served as the fundamental source of federally protected rights against the state. Yet the Supreme Court gradually eased many of the restrictions on state power enforced in the contract clause cases while developing the doctrine of substantive due process after the Civil War. By the end of the nineteenth century, the due process clause had usurped the place of the contract clause as the centerpiece in litigation about individual rights. Most analyses of the history of federally protected rights against the state have emphasized the rise of substantive due process to the …
Court-Packing And Compromise, Barry Cushman
Court-Packing And Compromise, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
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 …