The Constitution in the Supreme Court: 1921-1930
THE CONSTITUTION IN THE SUPREME COURT: 1921-1930 DAVID P. CURRIE* The selection of William Howard Taft to succeed Edward D. White as Chief Justice in 1921 was followed by three additional appointments in the next two years: George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, and Edward T. Sanford replaced William R. Day, Mahlon Pitney, and John H. Clarke. The upshot was something of a reign of terror for state and federal legislation.' White himself had been no great supporter of progressive legislation, and neither Day nor Pitney was in later terms a flaming liberal. The last two, however, had frequently voted with Holmes, Brandeis, and Clarke to sustain social legislation against due process attacks. Sutherland, But- ler, and Sanford, like Taft, tended to cast their lot with Van Devanter, McReynolds, and McKenna, who had been frequent dissenters in sub- stantive due process cases before 1921; thus a vocal minority became a solid majority within a two-year period. The replacement of McKenna by Harlan F. Stone in 1925 merely increased the number of regular dis- senters from two to three.2 * Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law, University of Chicago. Thanks to Mary Beth Gose for managing the computer; to Nelson Lund, David Vandermeulen, Steve Rowland, and Richard Cray Donaldson for useful seminar papers; and to Albert Alschuler, Frank Easterbrook, Richard Helm- holz, Richard Posner, Carol Rose, Geoffrey Stone, Cass Sunstein, and William Van Alstyne for helpful criticism. 1. See Brown, Due Process of Law, Police Power, and the Supreme Court, 40 HARv. L. REV. 943, 944 (1927) ("[I]n the six years since 1920 the Supreme Court has declared social and economic legislation unconstitutional under the due process clauses of either the Fifth or the Fourteenth Amendment in more cases than in the entire fifty-two previous years ...
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