| In the six-year period following President Franklin D. Roosevelt's abortive attempt to "pack" the Supreme Court in 1937, Roosevelt had the opportunity to appoint eight Justices to that tribunal: Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, James F. Byrnes, Robert Jackson, and Wiley B. Rutledge. All indications were that the ration would be treated to a judicial Era of Good Feelings after having endured a constitutional crisis made more intense by numerous dissenting opinions and rather sharply defined liberal versus conservative voting blocs on the Old Court.;What accounts for such disparate legal views and ill-feeling among Justices who all owed their commissions to the same President? This dissertation seeks to establish that what helped to divide the Roosevelt Justices in the 1940s was a series of "lessons" they all had learned in the 1920s and 1930s (in reaction to the jurisprudence and imprudence of the Old Court) about how judges ought to decide cases and what kind of individuals should be recruited for the judiciary. Although the men whom President Roosevelt appointed seemed to agree on how and why the Old Court had fallen into error--and shared fully the characteristics the President sought in judicial nominees--they quickly discovered that the same attitudes about law and the judicial function which would equip them to tear down the conservative jurisprudence of the Old Court would be of more limited value in constructing a coherent liberal jurisprudence to take its place.;There were, however, more than twice as many nonunanimous judgments handed down during practically every term of the Roosevelt Court (1941-1949) than there had been even in 1937 at the height of the crisis. Divisions and discord on the bench were exacerbated by bitter personal feuds and squabbles off the bench, the most notorious example of which was Jackson's public condemnation of Black for sitting on cases argued by Black's former law partner. |
