The Hughes Court: Volume 11

A comprehensive study of the US Supreme Court that explores the transformation of constitutional law from 1930 to 1941.

This comprehensive study unpacks the claim that there was a Constitutional Revolution in 1937, instead concluding that US constitutional law gradually transformed throughout the 1930s. In combining doctrinal analysis with the political, economic and social contexts of the Court's decisions, this will interest both historians and legal scholars.The Hughes Court: From Progressivism to Pluralism, 1930 to 1941 describes the closing of one era in constitutional jurisprudence and the opening of another. This comprehensive study of the Supreme Court from 1930 to 1941 – when Charles Evans Hughes was Chief Justice – shows how nearly all justices, even the most conservative, accepted the broad premises of a Progressive theory of government and the Constitution. The Progressive view gradually increased its hold throughout the decade, but at its end, interest group pluralism began to influence the law. By 1941, constitutional and public law was discernibly different from what it had been in 1930, but there was no sharp or instantaneous Constitutional Revolution in 1937 despite claims to the contrary. This study supports its conclusions by examining the Court's work in constitutional law, administrative law, the law of justiciability, civil rights and civil liberties, and statutory interpretation.