Supreme Court, United States: From the Civil War to the 1940s1937

The end of the Civil War to 1937 encompasses the second great period in the history of the court. After the adoption (1868) of the Fourteenth Amendment, the character of litigation before the court was altered, and there were many cases alleging that state legislation took liberty or property without due process of law, or denied equal protection of the laws. In the late 19th cent., the flood of litigation arising from a wide variety of causes was delaying the disposition of cases up to three years. Relief was imperative, and finally, in 1891, Congress created the circuit courts of appeals to give a final hearing to most appeals and excused the justices from riding circuit (however, each justice still heads one or more circuits).

In the early 20th cent., the court appeared to be highly conservative in its views. It showed in general a rigid adherence to stare decisis (the rule that precedents are to be followed), a tendency to prevent the states from adopting laws that restricted business in its employment practices and other activities, and little disposition to restrain the states from restricting civil liberties, as in the Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896), which upheld the right of states to enforce segregationist Jim Crow legislation in many Southern states. In the Insular Cases (1901), arising out of questions concerning the status of peoples in the territories acquired as a result of the Spanish-American War, the court asserted that the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution did not automatically apply to the people of an annexed territory, i.e., the Constitution did not follow the flag.

In one notable case, Muller v. Oregon (1908), the court departed from its conservative stand to uphold a state law limiting the maximum working hours of women. The case was unique in that Louis D. Brandeis, counsel for the state, and later to become a distinguished member of the court, eschewed the traditional legal arguments and showed with overwhelming evidence from physicians, factory inspectors, and social workers that the number of hours women worked affected their health and morale. The modern concern with civil liberties began in the aftermath of World War I, as the court, led by Oliver Wendell Holmes and Brandeis, began to expand the constitutional protections to free speech.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• The Current Court
• The 1950s to the PresentThe 1950s and 1960s: Civil Liberties and Criminal Procedure
• The Roosevelt Years
• From the Civil War to the 1940s1937
• The Court under Taney
• The Court under Marshall
• Early Years to the Civil War
• Membership
• Functions
• Procedures
• Scope and Jurisdiction
• Bibliography

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