A few years ago, I was charmed by the reading of Empire of Liberty by Gordon S.Wood concerning the early history of the United States of America. I especially enjoyed the introduction he provided to the issue of the Supreme Court and Judicial Review. With an amazing talent, he related the conflicts between the federalists on the Supreme Court and the jeffersonians who thought the Supreme Court was overriding the will of the people.With similar talent and notwithstanding his political bias (he was a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration), author Jeff Shesol relates the conflicts between the Supreme Court and democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He paints an amazing biography of all of the nine justices and how each of everyone of them had come to develop their judicial thinking. After setting the stage of the Great Depression, he jumps in all the cases that saw the administration and the Supreme Court clash over. From the famous unanimous verdict of the Schecter Brothers that invalidated the National Industrial Recovery Act to the Butler case that invalidated the Agricultural Adjustment Act, Shesol forgets nothing.
What is most interesting is the struggle between the branches of government especially as FDR attemps to pack the court with new justices. It reminds us that government is always a question of balance between different branches of power and that no one branch should be seen as superior to the other. For example, it might be true that the USSC ended up invalidating the NIRA and the AAA that have been blamed for the lenghtening of the Great Depression, however some of the same justices on the Supreme Court were amongst those who upheld law forcing sterilization of "the feeble-minded"(Buck v Bell).
Shesol in a way reminds us that government is always a question of striking a balance between powers but also that powers will shift with time and other powers will react to maintain it. A magnificantly written book full of interesting little facts. Worth reading indeed...
