The Chief Justiceship of William Howard Taft, 1921-1930 , livre ebook

The Chief Justiceship of William Howard Taft, 1921-1930
CHIEF JUSTICESHIPS OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT
Herbert A. Johnson, Series Editor
The Chief Justiceship of William Howard Taft, 1921-1930
Jonathan Lurie
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-987-3 cloth
ISBN 978-1-61117-988-0 ebook
Front cover photograph courtesy of the
Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons
For Mac Fifty years and going strong
The past is never dead. It s not even past. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
Contents
List of Illustrations
Series Editor s Preface
Preface
1 Taft and His Court in 1921: The Cast of Players
2 Arrival and Beginnings, 1921-1922
3 New Arrivals, Ongoing Litigation, and New Statutes
4 The Judges Bill, 1922-1925
5 1924-1925: A Final Appointment amid Emerging Judicial Trends
6 1926: Lengthening Shadows, and Litigation of Significance
7 1927-1928, Part I: Civil Rights, Civil Wrongs, and Some Apparent Cracks in Classical Legal Thought
8 1927-1928, Part II: Battle Lines Harden, and Planning for the Future
9 1928-1929, Part I: The Fissures Deepen
10 1928-1929, Part II: The Taft Court in Decline
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index of Cases
Subject Index
Illustrations
The Taft court in 1921
The Taft court in 1925
Chief Justice William Howard Taft
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Justice Louis Brandeis
Two sketches of the proposed new U.S. Supreme Court building, drawn by Cass Gilbert (1931)
The completed building
Series Editor s Preface
This is a unique and long-awaited addition to our knowledge of U.S. Supreme Court history. The subject matter is distinguished by the fact that this volume covers a singular situation: Chief Justice Taft was, and continues to be, the only individual privileged to serve as president of the United States before he was appointed to become the presiding officer of the Court during what proved to be one of the most formative decades of its existence. Indeed, institutionally the Taft chief justiceship is at least as remarkable for its administrative innovations as it is for its contributions to constitutional jurisprudence and political thought. Arguably it represents the first step toward the emergence of the Supreme Court as we know it today.
Readers will enjoy the benefit of an exhaustively researched monograph that is artfully written and perceptively presented. Drawing on his skills as a biographer, Professor Lurie provides a blow-by-blow description of how Chief Justice Taft was either responsible as president for appointing some of his future colleagues on the Court or, in the alternative, was influential in recommending the appointment of newer justices by Presidents Harding or Coolidge. Equally fascinating is the description of Taft s political acumen as he deftly guided the Judges Bill through Congress primarily through the testimony of his associate justices. By so identifying this procedural reform as a matter desired by the entire Court, he adroitly avoided the appearance of being either personally overbearing or improper in his lobbying approaches to Congress. To that major achievement we may add his successful efforts to gain congressional approvals for annual administrative meetings of senor circuit-court justices, to secure legislative authority enabling a chief justice to temporarily reassign federal judges to meet emergency judicial demands, and to secure appropriations to fund planning for the current free-standing Supreme Court building, as well as financing for its construction.
We are also given a unique insight into the psychological cost of serving as a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Along with his judicial predecessors and successors, Taft was burdened with the task of gaining the approval of a majority of his colleagues before an opinion of the Court might be written and announced. As Professor Lurie amply demonstrates, the Supreme Court under Taft s leadership was dominated by a dedicated group of conservative justices devoted to the classical legal tradition. They clashed with a dynamic and vocal trio of progressives who were sensitive to modern social and economic conditions. Included within the frequently dissenting progressive minority were the formidable Louis Brandeis and the legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes. In his attempts to secure majority opinions, the chief justice found himself continually challenged and frequently frustrated, and he poured out his troubles in revealing private letters to his family. Regardless of political or jurisprudential preferences, the reader will be moved to sympathy for this troubled Prometheus tied to the hard rock of judicial duty and leadership.
In his epilogue Professor Lurie admits that his studies of the Taft Court have left him with a lingering sense of admiration, although tempered by ambivalence, in regard to its constitutional contributions. Clearly the conservative inclinations of the Court majority resulted in a limited capacity to deal with some serious economic and social problems. But simultaneously the Court launched the initial efforts to use the Fourteenth Amendment as the vehicle by which certain personal liberty provisions of the federal Bill of Rights might be applied to the states through what subsequently has been termed incorporation. Notably many of those efforts were by Justice James McReynolds, one of the Court s most determined conservative members.
The Taft Court was also careful to respect the dynamics of federal-level checks and balances in its jurisprudence. Reviewing factual holdings made by the Interstate Commerce Court, the Taft Court deferred to the rate-fixing expertise of that tribunal, established by Congress to perform a quasi-legislative duty. On the other hand, in declaring legislation unconstitutional, the Taft Court was far more active in nullifying state statutes rather than those enacted by Congress, tacitly endorsing federal preeminence and the need for nationwide uniformity. As I read Lurie s conclusions, he finds that while the Court under Taft was dominated by classical legal concepts, at the same time it was sensitive to, and at times was responsive to, the demands of modernization in economic life and society.
In light of this perspective, this monograph urges us to take a new look not only at the legacy of the Taft Court, but also to reconsider the multifarious forms of continuity that characterize early twentieth-century constitutional history. In following Lurie s narrative, I found striking parallels between the intellectual struggles of the Taft Court factions and the 1935-37 tensions between the Supreme Court majority and the political branches of the state and federal governments. And Lurie is careful to point out that classical legal thought remains with us in the vestiges of legal formalism and originalism in contemporary constitutional theory, even though it seems to have been eclipsed as a dominating force in Supreme Court decision-making.
One powerful basis for a classical legal tradition is the legal profession s preference for a predictable system of precedent, which provides certainty to the law, particularly in the area of constitutional decisions. Yet such certainty can carry with it the danger of legal obsolescence. It also can hinder the necessary adjustments that a democratic government must make to protect the interests of a sovereign people. In essence these are the ambiguities that Professor Lurie invites us to contemplate.
Preface
The following chapters describe the United States Supreme Court and some of the cases it considered between 1921 and 1930. This was the era of the Taft court, named for the former president who served as chief justice from June 1921 through February 1930. William Howard Taft presided over his court for eight full terms. He brought several specific conceptions to his role, all of which are reflected in these chapters.
A lifelong Republican, Taft subscribed to a judicial philosophy that may be labeled as classical legal thought. It is fully described herein, but some specific characteristics may be cited here, though they are detailed in the following chapters. They included a strong emphasis on the rights of property, a deep attachment to liberty of contract, a distrust of regulatory legislation, and repeated emphasis on the limited power of the judiciary even as the decisions of his court augmented it. Moreover, as chief justice, Taft deprecated dissent among his brethren. With few exceptions he believed them to be simply ego tripping on the part of dissenting jurists. He rarely dissented in his eight full terms and on numerous occasions withheld his proposed disagreements in the interests of producing judicial unanimity among his colleagues.
In his early years in the center seat, Taft repeatedly demonstrated his success in shaping such consensus. But it did not last. Long dominant in conservative legal circles, by the 1920s classical legal thought was in decline. Buffeted by lingering currents of progressivism, it was repeatedly attacked by legal scholars and by two of the most distinguished justices on Taft s court, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Especially in the last three years of Taft s tenure, these two dissenters were often joined by a third justice, Harlan Stone. As his health worsened and his negotiating and compromising abilities declined Taft found himself denouncing the Bolsheviki among his brethren. Whe