Essay on "William Howard Taft"

Essay 10 pages (3536 words) Sources: 8 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

The Courts allow for an outlet to help decide important cases relative to Constitutional laws and regulations and are therefore powerful policy makers in their own right. The U.S. Court of Appeals acts to change political and public policy just as much as any other mechanism for change within the U.S. democratic framework of government. Although the Evarts Act had allowed some use of judicial discretion, in 1925, over 80% of Supreme Court cases were still under mandatory review, and by 1918 it had "fallen more than a year behind schedule" (Provine, 1980, p. 11). In 1922 Chief Justice William Howard Taft lobbied Congress for legislation that established the Conference of Senior Circuit Judges, which is today known as the Judicial Conference of the United States. As Taft envisioned it, the Conference would oversee the "transfer and temporary assignment of judges to meet varying docket demands" (Kastenmeier and Remington, 1988, pp. 61-62).

The Judiciary Act of 1925, also popularly known as the "Judges Bill," aimed to ease the caseload crisis brought forth by World War I. Chief Justice William Howard Taft pushed for this legislation to allow the Supreme Court greater management over cases that it heard, and organized the American Bar Association to lobby Congress for its passage. Taft wrote in 1924 that "a man can't do all the work there is to do" because the number of cases kept increasing every year (Provine, p. 11). He also insisted that the Supreme Court should not "function primarily as an appellate court for correcting lower court errors" (Provine, p. 12). Up to this time, appeals based on writs of error from the lower courts required mandatory Supreme Court review, and were more numerous than cases of discretionary jurisdiction under writs of certiorari. Taft's first draft of the bill contained a provision requiring mandatory review of all state court cases that affected "private property" and also required review of "federal courts of appeals decisions denying the constitutionality of state statutes" or upholding or overturning state laws that were "repugnant to the national Constitution, laws, or treaties" (Fish, 2005, p. 549).

Taft had been a career politician and president of the United States, so he was perfectly comfortable conducting a lobbying campaign with Congress, although the goal of his activism was to uphold conservative legal and political principles. As a conservative Chief Justice in the 1920s, he "politicked tirelessly to secure the appointment of jurists he considered 'sound' to offset the 'Bolshevik' views of Brandeis and the dangerously unreliable Holmes" (Wiecek, 1998, p. 161). His goal was most certainly not to radicalize the Court and move it to the Left, like the New Dealers of the 1930s or the civil rights advocates of the 1960s, but he greatly expanded its powers "rendering its control over state statutes and state supreme courts firmer than ever" (Wiecek, p. 161). Taft and his fellow conservatives did not anticipate the Great Depression and the New Deal, but used the federal courts to strike down state statutes that regulated business. After all, 1925 was still the era of Normalcy and Calvin Coolidge, not Franklin Roosevelt, and the Taft Court struck down a wide variety of state regulations of nearly every type of commerce, including pharmacies, retailing, gas stations and employment agencies. Surprisingly, though, it did not overturn the North Dakota laws that created state-owned banks, warehouses and grain mills (Wiecek, p. 163). Taft did limit the powers of the Federal Trade Commission by taking away its ability to define unfair trade practices and turning it over to the federal courts (Wiecek, p. 164).

Progressives in Congress were often hostile to Taft and the conservative federal courts for overturning labor laws and regulation of business. They were also reluctant to grant him the power to write the federal rules of procedure through the Conference of Judges and delayed this proposal for years. In 1925, though, Taft and the ABA sold their bill to Congress on the basis that it would be a purely technical measure designed to increase efficiency and rationalization of the courts, while the members of Congress deferred to the "justices' wishes because of the bill's technical complexity" (Buchman, p. 1). In any case, the Republicans had a clear majority in Congress before the Great Depression and agreed with Taft ideologically. He therefore found very "little resistance from either chamber of Congress," including the Progressives and organized labor (Buchman, p. 10). Had a similar law been proposed today it would receive very careful examination by a wide variety of interest groups and result in considerable debate in both houses of Congress, but nothing of the kind happened with the 1925 Act, and no other lobbyists appeared except the Supreme Court justices and the American Bar Association, while Congressional records indicate that it passed with minimal discussion and debate. Even among historians and specialists on the 1920s, this particular law simply seems to have faded into obscurity almost as soon as it passed, and generated none of the contemporary or historical debate of other events such as the Roosevelt 'court-packing' plan of 1937. This is surprising since Roosevelt was simply asking Congress to increase the number of Supreme Court justices, which it had the power to do and in fact had done in the past, while Taft was requesting a major judicial overhaul and restructuring.

-III Keynote Opinion/Dissent-

In this section, discuss what you think is the most important majority opinion, minority opinion or dissenting opinion your Justice authored during their career. Recount the basic facts of the case, the key issues at hand and how your Justice interpreted them in coming up with the opinion/dissent. Be sure to discuss the decision's impact on the law as well as society at large and the reasons why you think it was that individual's signature achievement.

Taft was the unquestioned leader of the six conservatives of the Court, and even met with them at his house every Sunday to coordinate strategy and policy against the three dissenters on the Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brandies and Harlan Stone. During the 1920s, Taft had a "staunchly conservative" majority of six on the Court and almost always voted with them (Mason, p. 52). His one significant dissent occurred in 1923 when he voted with his enemy Holmes in Adkins v. Children's Hospital in favor of a federal law that guaranteed a minimum wage for women (Mason, p. 52). This dissent was so unusual given his legal, political and ideological views that scholars have a difficult time accounting for it. Given Taft's openly conservative views on almost every case of this kind, it stands out dramatically in his record. Perhaps it was related to his experience on the War Labor Board during World War I, when he professed to be shocked at how low wages really were in the U.S. And exclaimed "I had no idea. How can people live on such wages?" (Mason, p. 52). Earlier in his career, he had also been highly critical of the Lochner V. New York decision in 1905 and in 1919 had publicly oppsed the use of injunctions against labor unions, which he called absurd. In his dissent, Taft wrote that he was not certain if minimum wage laws were truly beneficial, but that it was not the place of the Court "to hold congressional acts invalid simply because they are passed to carry out economic views which the Court believes to be unwise or unsound" (Mason, p. 53).

Taft never repeated his dissent on any issues like these in the future, and most of his decisions were unfriendly to organized labor while upholding the rights and prerogatives of capital. In Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co (1922), he joined the conservative majority is striking down a federal tax on child labor that Congress had passed in 1919 on the grounds that the tenth Amendment required issues like child labor laws to be dealt with on the state level. Taft was usually very devoted to judicial precedents and unwilling to overturn previous Supreme Court decisions, which he thought could only be changed by Constitutional Amendments. In this case, he cited the precedent of Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) which had denied Congress the power to regulate child labor (Mason, p. 54). Nor was he friendly to state regulation of business, and continued the legacy of late-19th and early-20th Century Supreme Courts in reducing the powers of the states to regulate commerce and business interests, and limiting the application of the Munn v. Illinois decision of 1876. In Tyson v. Banton (1927), Taft joined with the five other conservatives on the Court in overturning a state law that regulated ticket sales on the grounds that prices and wages could not be regulated by the government (Mason, p. 61). Even as he was about to step down in 1930, he warned Herbert Hoover against appointing… READ MORE

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