William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter: Ideology and Personality on the Supreme Court

Abstract

FOLLOWING THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS OF 1937, the personnel of the United States Supreme Court changed rapidly as Franklin Roosevelt named new justices whom he believed committed to the modem views of the New Deal. The Roosevelt appointees constituted a majority of the Court by 1942, but instead of harmony, the Court entered one of the most divisive periods in its history. Economic issues had dominated the Court's calendar for nearly a halfcentury, and judges had often imposed their own conservative views to strike down reform laws passed by Congress or the state legislatures. Critics had demanded that the courts exercise judicial restraint, and defer to the elected political organs of government in determining policy; courts should strike down laws only if they clearly violated constitutional constraints, and not because the judges disagreed with them. But beginning in the late 1930s, new questions of civil liberties and the reach of the Bill of Rights replaced economic issues as the main items on court agendas, and these cast the jurisprudential debate between judicial restraint and judicial activism in a new light. The struggle within the Court in the early 1940s can be examined not only in terms of competing judicial philosophies, but by looking at personalities as well. Felix Frankfurter and William 0. Douglas, both