FDR was able to nominate a total of 9 supreme court justices while in office. Was there a direct effect because of it?

by malgoya
theotherone723

Yes! FDR's nominations to the Court helped bring an end to what has since come to be known as the Lochner-era of the Supreme Court.

Starting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Supreme Court began striking down many economic regulations as unconstitutional violations of the "freedom of contract." In Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), the Court ruled that a New York statute that regulated the maximum number of hours a day that bakers could work was unconstitutional. With Lochner, the Court embraced what we today would consider to be very conservative a laissez faire economic policy. Other economic regulations the Court struck down included workers' right to unionize (Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915)), minimum wage laws (Adkins v. Children's Hospital of D. C., 261 U.S. 525 (1923)), and child labor laws (Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918)).

Also among the victims of the Lochner-era Court were many of FDR's early New Deal programs, such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act (United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936)). This led to FDR proposing his infamous "court packing" plan, which would have increased the size of the Supreme Court from 9 justices to 15 by allowing FDR to nominate one additional justice for every currently sitting justice over the age of 70.5 (with a max of 6) and would have allowed FDR to appoint enough new justices to have a majority of the Court that was friendly to the New Deal. While FDR's court packing plan ultimately failed, he was eventually able to nominate enough New Deal-friendly justices to the Court so that it started rejecting its Lochner-era jurisprudence and begin to start upholding economic regulations, starting with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), which overturned Adkins and upheld the constitutionality of minimum wage laws.

Georgy_K_Zhukov

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malgoya