The Court Changes Leaders
THE COURT CHANGES LEADERS WITH the tributes to William Howard Taft and to Charles Evans Hughes we are in hearty agreement. The one commands our respect as completely as any man who has lived in our...
...Taft's resignation) that under his direction the Court has erased most of the complaints against it...
...Hughes as Chief Justice reminds us that we may be nearing a wholesale change in the Court's personnel...
...But it has also nullified laws not clearly in violation of the constitution...
...Hoover may not get another four years...
...Justice Holmes may still be known chiefly for his dissenting opinions, but he has lived to see more than one dissenting opinion of yesterday become the Court's decision of today...
...Give him twenty-seven more and he would make of it a court of justice instead of a very admirable court of academic law...
...Clearly the Supreme Court was designed to overthrow state laws only where these came in flagrant conflict with the constitution...
...Indeed it is not unlikely that Mr...
...complaints which at one time led a very considerable movement to reduce its powers...
...Justice Holmes surprised Roosevelt, and of course Mr...
...Hoover will be called upon to appoint at least five associate justices during his administration, especially if he is elected to another four years...
...Instead it has been one of the most able instruments of the movement to center all power in the federal government...
...But we think it is a little extravagant to say (as many hurried to do following Mr...
...Hoover's convictions, it is not probable that his appointments would greatly affect the temperament of the Court...
...Of course the Supreme Court was established principally to draft treaties of peace, as it were, between the federal power and the states...
...Hoover is pretty well in line with three of them...
...nullified them on the shading of a word, sometimes by a majority of no more than one...
...The one commands our respect as completely as any man who has lived in our times...
...Of course, men appointed to the Court sometimes surprise the Presidents who appointed them, as Mr...
...The Court is softening a little, and we say this in full awareness of the restrictiveness which characterizes most of its decisions at present...
...We hope that in ten years they will be...
...He has been an associate justice for more than twenty-seven years now, and his ideas are beginning to sift through...
...Under Mr...
...The Oregon School Law was such a law, and it was the Supreme Court's business to nullify it...
...to take from the states even their control over the personal behavior of their citizens...
...the other is his worthy successor...
...The chief antagonist is dead, and with him the plan to take away from the Supreme Court its power of absolute veto...
...but the grievance which motivated him still exists...
...The times are not yet ripe...
...It has done this in two ways: by upholding such laws of federal control as the Volstead Act, and by nullifying many state laws which were meant to correct conditions so purely local as to be no proper concern of the nation as a whole...
...But all in all our guess is that ten years must pass before we can dare to ask that the Court reflect some of the specific judiciary sentiment of the twentieth century...
...Those complaints are not so clamorously recited today as they were six and eight years ago simply because the first Senator La Follette is dead, and men in sympathy with his spirit, but not his programs, have come to see that the remedy he proposed was too drastic, and fringed with altogether too great dangers...
...and the pity of it is that often these laws have been designed to do away with fraud and unfairness...
...The sudden appearance of Mr...
...Its purpose was to terminate conflicts rising out of our twofold scheme of government, and by eliminating friction, to preserve that scheme...
...And this is not so vain as may be thought...
...Examples in very recent years are the New York law to prevent theatre-ticket brokers from charging a premium of more than $.50 over the box-office price, and the Arizona law to refuse injunctions in labor disputes, both of which were well designed to correct local abuses, and both of which were overthrown on the merest technicality...
...Taft, it represented the choices of five Presidents, beginning with Roosevelt, and Mr...
...But given a President of Mr...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 16
