Notre Dame Law School NDLScholarship Journal Articles Publications Winter 2012 The uH ghes-Roberts Visit Barry Cushman Notre Dame Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Barry Cushman, The Hughes-Roberts Visit, 15 Green Bag 2D 125 (2012). Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1164 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE HUGHES-ROBERTS VISIT Barry Cushman† HE BEHAVIOR OF JUSTICE OWEN ROBERTS in the minimum wage cases that came before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1936 and 1937 has long been the subject of scholarly interest and debate. In Morehead v. New York Tex rel. Tipaldo , decided in June of 1936, Justice Roberts joined the Four Horsemen in striking down New York’s minimum wage stat- ute for women.1 The following term, however, Justice Roberts supplied the crucial fifth vote to uphold the Washington State min- imum wage law in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish.2 The question that has long preoccupied scholars is, of course, what accounts for this “switch”? In an article published in the North Carolina Law Review in 2005, Professor William Leuchtenburg observed that several explanations for Roberts’ conduct in the minimum wage cases have been offered, “with one of the most abiding that at some point [Chief Justice Charles Evans] Hughes must have taken Roberts aside and told him that, for the sake of the Court as an institution, he had to abandon the Four Horsemen.”3 Professor Leuchtenburg further reported that “At a symposium on the Court-packing crisis in which I participated † Barry Cushman is the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, David H.