Lochner era. West Coast Hotel is notable because it effectively ended the Courts Lochner era of jurisprudence. The Lochner era began with its namesake, the Supreme Court case of Lochner v. New York, which established that a New York maximum hours
Lochner
In 1937, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the landmark decision of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. This case held that a Washington state minimum-wage law was constitutional. West Coast Hotel is notable because it effectively ended the Court’s Lochner era of jurisprudence. The Lochner era began with its namesake, the Supreme Court case of Lochner v. New York, which established that a New York maximum hours law violated liberty of contract, an implied right under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. The Lochner decision espoused a laissez-faire economic model, which favored little or no government regulation of the economy and workplace. The Lochner era lasted from 1905 until 1937. While the Court eventually did begin to uphold labor laws if they demonstrated a legitimate health interest (generally in the case of women), most government regulation was struck down. This was especially problematic to the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which sought to enact vast economic reform and regulation with New Deal legislation. The shift from the Lochner era seemed to be quite rapid. The conservative bloc of the Court, nicknamed the “Four Horsemen”, was often joined by a moderate, Justice Owen Roberts, in order to strike down New Deal legislation. However, just after Roosevelt proposed his infamous “court-packing plan” to stock the Court with his own appointees, Roberts voted with the Court’s liberal side in the West Coast Hotel case. This change in alliance is often referred to as the “switch in time that saved the nine”, because it presumably halted the plan to manipulate the Court’s membership. Although the court packing plan is the conventional reasoning supplied for the end of the Lochner era, other scholars argue that it had no influence whatsoever. If not the court-packing plan, what did change Roberts’ mind? Was he influenced by external or internal factors, or did his views simply shift over time? This paper will examine the different reasons why justices vote the way they do, and how those reasons sometimes change.
Several authors have studied the reasons behind Supreme Court votes. This is of course a very important subject for constitutional scholars, because the Supreme Court has ultimate say over any interpretations of constitutional law. This paper will first give some background on the Supreme Court and its structure, and then examine three different areas of influence on the justices’ decisions: personal influence, internal influence, and external influence. The Supreme Court was established through the United States Constitution, as the head of the judiciary branch of government. When established it was seen as clearly the weakest of the three branches. The size of the Court is established by Congress, and has fluctuated over its history, ranging from five members to ten members. The Court currently has nine members. The Court was essentially powerless for much of its infancy. The Constitution did not set out a strictly defined role or regulations for the Court, and consequently, for its first ten years, the Court had little or no power. It was not until the appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice in 1801 that the Court began to gain influence. Marshall began rapidly molding the Court into an institution that the other branches of government would be forced to respect, starting with the landmark decision of Marbury v. Madison in 1803. This decision established the Court’s power of judicial review: the ability to strike down a law as unconstitutional. This newfound power over the legislature and the president allowed the Court to gain influence in the new American government. Eventually, a system of federal appellate courts was created: originally the only federal court was the Supreme Court itself. Each Associate Justice and the Chief Justice all employ clerks, important assistants who perform research and other vital functions.
Several “personal influences” impact how the Supreme Court makes decisions. By this, I mean that each individual justice has different views, goals, histories, and methods of interpretation which influence his view on the Court. All of these influences are taken into account when a justice is nominated. All Supreme Court justices are appointed for life. This means that they serve until they resign, retire, or die. Prospective justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by a majority of the Senate, and because justices are such enduring marks of a president’s tenure, Supreme Court nominees are selected with extreme care. Presidents attempt to choose a justice who in turn will then carry on the president’s policy legacy. However, just because a conservative president appointed a justice does not mean that justice will be conservative. One recent example of this is the recently retired Justice David Souter, from New Hampshire. Souter was appointed by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, but during his tenure on the Court he was generally agreed to be a strong member of the Court’s liberal faction. Souter is not an anomaly, though his case is particularly drastic. Some researchers have found that if presidents (and their staffs) do due diligence, new justices should perform as predicted while they are on the bench. David Rohde and Harold Spaethe (1976) analyze data which shows that “three major values” influence decisions on the bench. These three “values”, or factors, are found by Rohde and Spaethe to be freedom, equality, and New Deal economics. “Freedom” generally applies to civil liberties (freedom of expression), “equality” to civil rights (especially the Fourteenth Amendment), and “New Deal economics” of course to governmental regulation of economics. The authors choose these “values” because they find that one or more of them are the issue in at least 80 percent of Supreme Court cases. The authors then begin to make predictions on Court decisions based on their three indicators. The results show that almost 86 percent of their predictions (over a 3-year period) are correct, including a 100 percent prediction rating for Justice Blackmun. Another study with similar characteristics was also successful in the late 1980s, when two researchers “observed a correlation of .80 between values and votes”, a statistic with great statistical significance. This study covered an even larger number of justices, stretching over a thirty year period. It is important to note that the scope of this analysis was even more limited than the former study. The second study considered only views and votes on civil liberty cases. However, I believe that the findings are still significant. Drawing on this evidence, one can conclude that MOST, if not ALL, Supreme Court votes are influenced solely by the views of the justice. Therefore, internal and external influence may have little actual effect. If this is true, as Rohde and Spaethe say, justice might truly be “blind”; that is, based on no externalities, just the law.
