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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Law
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
Barry Cushman
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 …
The Limits Of The New Deal Analogy, Barry Cushman
The Limits Of The New Deal Analogy, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
The past three years of the Obama Administration inevitably have elicited comparisons between the present day and the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. While frequently illuminating, such comparisons often overlook an important point that many may have forgotten: compared with the major reform initiatives undertaken during President Obama’s tenure, a review of the roll call votes reveals that the measures enacted by the New Deal Congresses enjoyed a remarkable degree of bipartisan support. In addition, the Democrats enjoyed large majorities in the House of Representatives from 1933 forward, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate after 1934.These …
Nfib V. Sebelius And The Transformation Of The Taxing Power, Barry Cushman
Nfib V. Sebelius And The Transformation Of The Taxing Power, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for a majority of five Justices in holding that the “shared responsibility payment” required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) constituted an imposition of a “tax” rather than a “penalty.” Thus, even though the Chief Justice and four other Justices had concluded that the provision was not a legitimate exercise of the commerce power, the Court held that it was a valid exercise of the taxing power. The origin of the distinction between taxes and penalties in taxing power jurisprudence is found in the 1922 …
The Hughes-Roberts Visit, Barry Cushman
The Hughes-Roberts Visit, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
In the 1936 case of Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, Justice Owen Roberts voted to invalidate New York’s minimum wage law for women. The following spring, Roberts joined the majority in upholding Washington State’s minimum wage statute. How best to account for this “switch” is a central preoccupation of New Deal constitutional history. In recent years, a number of scholars have called attention to a visit that Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and his wife made to Roberts’ Pennsylvania farm in the summer of 1936, in the wake of the public firestorm following the announcement of the Tipaldo …
Lost Fidelities, Barry Cushman
Lost Fidelities, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
Owen Roberts was accused of a variety of things in 1937, but “fidelity” was not among them. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone and Professor Felix Frankfurter were among many who accused Roberts of performing, as Frankfurter put it, a jurisprudential “somersault” “incapable of being attributed to a single factor relevant to the professed judicial process.” To Frankfurter, it was “all painful beyond words,” and gave him “a sickening feeling which is aroused when moral standards are adulterated in a convent.” Yet when Roberts announced his retirement from the Court eight years later, Chief Justice Stone, along with now-Justices Frankfurter and Robert …
Vote Fluidity On The Hughes Court: The Critical Terms, 1934-1936, Barry Cushman
Vote Fluidity On The Hughes Court: The Critical Terms, 1934-1936, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
This article makes four principal claims. The first is that the justices of the Hughes Court often changed their positions in major cases between the time that they cast their votes in conference and their final votes on the merits. The second is that the Court achieved comparatively high rates of unanimity even during its most turbulent Terms because justices who had served on earlier Courts had internalized a norm counseling those who lost at the conference vote to acquiesce in the judgment of the majority. The third is that the justices who most frequently did so in this period’s …
Justice Brandeis And Substantive Due Process, Barry Cushman
Justice Brandeis And Substantive Due Process, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
This brief essay, prepared for the Touro Law Center and Jewish Law Institute conference, “Louis D. Brandeis: An Interdisciplinary Retrospective,” examines the substantive due process jurisprudence of Justice Brandeis.
The Hughes Court Docket Books: The Early Terms, 1929-1933, Barry Cushman
The Hughes Court Docket Books: The Early Terms, 1929-1933, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
For many years, the docket books kept by a number of the Hughes Court Justices have been held by the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court. Yet the existence of these docket books was not widely known, and access to them was highly restricted. In April of 2014, however, the Court adopted new guidelines designed to increase access to the docket books for researchers. This article offers a report and analysis based on a review of all of the docket books that the Curator’s Office holds for the early Hughes Court, comprising the 1929-1933 Terms. Only one of …
Interpreting Secretary Perkins, Barry Cushman
Interpreting Secretary Perkins, Barry Cushman
Barry Cushman
This essay is my contribution to an exchange with Professor Daniel R. Ernst of Georgetown University Law Center concerning the timing of a visit by Chief Justice Hughes and his wife to the Pennsylvania summer home of Justice Owen Roberts. In the 1950s, former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins recounted in the oral history interview she gave to Columbia University that Mrs. Roberts had reported to her that Hughes and Roberts had held extended, private conversations during that visit. It has been argued by some scholars that the visit took place during the summer of 1936, shortly after the Court …