Agricultural Adjustment Research Articles

Agricultural adjustment in flood-prone areas in Comilla of Bangladesh: A geographical study

This paper focuses on agricultural adjustment inclination in flood-prone areas in Comilla, Bangladesh. The study’s area is located in a tropical and rivers’ oriented developing country in Southeast Asia. It has a huge potential of agricultural activities, such as fertile soils of deltaic plains, vast rainfall of monsoon climate, and available labors. On the other hand, natural hazards, for examples, floods, cyclones, droughts and arsenic contaminations make a common hazardous phenomenon at this distinctive geographical location of the Bengal Basin. The study was done based on a primary survey from June 2008 to May 2009 at household levels. Moreover, an empirical field observation was carried out to decipher the trend of floods, such as river flood, flash flood, and flood due to rainfall in the study area. Also, an interview questionnaire survey was done by the experts and farmers to collect information about indigenous knowledge, traditional beliefs, and perception of agriculture and climatic trend to decrease the damages of crops from floods. In addition, farmers grow vegetables and fruits at medium and high lands (bhiti), Transferee Aman and Aus at medium and lowland, and Aman at very lowlands. Furthermore, farmers devise some strategies, such as cultivating crops for a short length growing period (LGP), and sowing hybrid seed to harvest them within an expected time. Besides these, farmers take some previous initiatives; for instance, make social networks, conduct special training for collection of crops in a short time, and arrange preservation preparation on the availability of supporting resources, types of floods, and characteristics of rainfall. However, farmers of this study area are excluded from modern technologies and information systems. Finally, the application of indigenous techniques, such as observation of flood trends, and variation of monsoon winds of farmers to adjust agricultural activities in flood prone areas, bears an enormous significance for this study. Key words: Adjustment process, crop diversification, land levels, perception.

The influence of agricultural policies on agriculture structure adjustment in Taiwan

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on labor movement in the agricultural sector of Taiwan to clarify the relationship between agricultural policy and the agricultural adjustment problem by estimating the labor movement function.Design/methodology/approachThe relationship between agricultural policy and the adjustment process of agricultural labor in Taiwan was analyzed by modeling labor movement between the agricultural sector and other sectors. Through empirical analysis of labor migration function, it is clear that the following policy factors, affect the incentive for labor migration, and obstruct off‐farm labor migration: the price support policy; the incomplete farmland conversion regulations, which increase farmers' farmland possession motive; and government agricultural expenditure, which includes direct transfers to the agricultural sector.FindingsThe study confirms that after the late 1980s the factors that obstruct agricultural adjustment much more than the price support policy are the incomplete farmland conversion regulations and increasing government agricultural payments, from the result of the simulation with the influence of the policy eliminated.Research limitations/implicationsThe implication of this paper is that even though Taiwan has been participating in World Trade Organization from 2002 and consented to cut the tariff on agricultural products and reduce agriculture support policies not linked to production, a delay in labor adjustment between the agricultural sector and other sectors may not necessarily be eliminated if there are other policy factors that affect the incentive for off‐farm migration by farmers.Originality/valueMany studies use the labor migration function for empirical analysis, but most of them estimated the function by a simple single regression which shows that the labor movement from the agricultural sector to the other sectors increases as a result of an expanding wage gap. However, off‐farm labor movement reduces the wage gap between sectors adversely. Therefore, a reverse causal relation exists between labor movement and the wage gap between sectors. The endogeneity problem was considered as analyzing the measurement of the labor migration function.

Barriers and solutions to China’s cultivated land protection

In 2008, China’s total area of cultivated land was approximately 121.7 million ha, accounting for 7.8% of the world’s total cultivated land; cultivated land per capita was 0.09 ha, only accounting for 38.2% of the world average. China’s cultivated lands were reduced by 12.31 million ha in the period 1997–2008; that is, a loss of 1.03 million ha per year. Although China implements stringent cultivated land protection policies and in some areas has achieved much success, the rate of reduction of cultivated land through rapid urbanisation, agricultural structure adjustment and ecological restoration has proved uncontrollable. Proposed solutions to China’s cultivated land protection include: 1) learning from the successful experiences of other countries; 2) reforming cultivated land protection measures; and 3) paying more attention to improving the quality of its cultivated lands.

The View from the Cotton: Reconsidering the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union

Abstract Having been evicted from their farms because of incentives created by the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, sharecroppers in Arkansas formed the bir acial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU) in 1934. Led by socialists and radicals, the organization ultimately claimed upward of thirty thousand members and constituted an assault on the social, economic, and racial status quo of the South. Historians have celebrated the STFU, especially its commitment to biracial cooperation and equality. This article digs beneath this carefully constructed image of the union to scrutinize the internal dynamics of the movement. It revises a number of interpretations surrounding the STFU Although the greatest obstacles to the union’s success were external, it also faced internal divisions that diminished its efficacy. The STFU’s decentralized structure did not foster strong connections between leadership and membership, resulting in misunderstandings. But most importantly, the union struggled to live up to its creed of biracialism and equal treatment of African Americans. Ultimately, the STFU was less an aberration that tirelessly confronted the social and racial ills of the South and more an organization that reflected some of those ills even as it grappled with them.

The View from the Cotton: Reconsidering the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union

Having been evicted from their homes because of incentives created by the New Deal's AGricultural ADjustment Act, sharecroppers in Arkansas formed the biracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) in 1934. Led by socialists and radicals, the organization ultimately claimed upward of thirty thousand members and constituted an assault on the social, economic, and racial status quo of the South. Historians have celebrated the STFU, especially its commitment to biracial cooperation and equality. This article digs beneath this carefully constructed image of the union to scrutinize the internal dynamics of the movement. It revises a number of interpretations surrounding the STFU. Although the greatest obstacles to the union's success were external, it also faced internal divisions that diminished its efficacy. The STFU's decentralized structure did not foster strong connections between leadership and membership, resulting in misunderstandings. But most importantly, the union struggled to live up to its creed of biracialism and equal treatment of African Americans. Ultimately, the STFU was less an aberration that tirelessly confronted the social and racial ills of the South and more an organization that reflected some of those ills even as it grappled with them.

The Enduring Impact of the American Dust Bowl: Short- and Long-Run Adjustments to Environmental Catastrophe

The 1930s American Dust Bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the Plains. The Dust Bowl is estimated to have immediately, substantially, and persistently reduced agricultural land values and revenues in more-eroded counties relative to less-eroded counties. During the Depression and through at least the 1950s, there was limited relative adjustment of farmland away from activities that became relatively less productive in more-eroded areas. Agricultural adjustments recovered less than 25 percent of the initial difference in agricultural costs for more-eroded counties. The economy adjusted predominantly through large relative population declines in more-eroded counties, both during the 1930s and through the 1950s. (JEL N32, N52, Q15, Q18, Q54)

Driving Away from the New Deal: Independent Trucking and the Deregulatory State

Driving Away from the New Deal:Independent Trucking and the Deregulatory State Jeffrey P. Moran (bio) Shane Hamilton . Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xii + 305 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $29.95. Breaker 1-9, we've got us a new book on trucks, trucking, and truckers. In Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy, Shane Hamilton makes the case for trucking's centrality not only to CB radio and country music, but to the modern nexus of agribusiness, virulent anti-statism, and consumer gratification. Independent, unregulated trucking, Hamilton argues, dissolved the old railroad monopolies, highlighted the limits of the New Deal approach to governmental regulation, weakened organized labor, and made possible the connection between modern agribusiness and consumers' tables. These are weighty changes to ascribe to a single technology, but Hamilton's clear prose and careful analysis bear the burden well. At the heart of Hamilton's thesis is the so-called "farm problem" of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although Hamilton never quite comes out and defines the phrase, the farm problem was (and is) roughly this: farmers want high returns for their products, but consumers want to pay as little for them as possible. While the explosion in farm productivity and the growth of an urban consumer population would seem tailor-made for solving the problem, from the era of Populist revolt onward the two trends never fully meshed. The Great Depression was the critical moment for this farm problem. Farmers had done very well during the Great War, and in the 1920s they continued to invest in tractors and other heavy equipment to chase the lure of prosperity. In order to pay off their debts, they needed to cultivate still more land. The result was, in part, a boom in productivity, but this boom also caused agricultural prices to plummet, as productivity outstripped domestic and foreign demand; thus, the Depression hit farmers particularly hard. Initially, New Dealers vacillated between seeing this problem as one of underconsumption and viewing it as one of overproduction. As in other New Deal initiatives, the overproductionists soon won out, their victory exemplified [End Page 617] by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration's notorious programs for killing six million hogs and plowing under one fourth of the Southern cotton crop—solving the problem of want amidst plenty by doing away with plenty, as Roosevelt's critics charged. After that initial shock, New Dealers tried to hold together a coalition of farmers and consumers with production limits and price supports, but with limited success in propping up farmers or feeding the hungry. Historians have also found that these programs led to greater agricultural consolidation, as large landowners found it more remunerative to kick sharecroppers and other laborers off their land in order to collect government subsidies for reducing production. For different reasons, New Deal attempts to regulate beef prices also generally failed, for the meatpackers strenuously evaded regulations; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for its part, was never fully invested in busting the "Beef Trust" in the first place. Most of the New Deal agricultural initiatives failed, Hamilton argues, because they ignored the major connection between overproducing farmers and underconsuming urbanites: transportation. While he denies that transportation technologies were determinative, Hamilton points out that railroads were almost the sole means of moving goods from the farm to the table, and thus all farm problems in the Depression era occurred within the framework of a "rail-bound nation" (p. 24). As the Populists had charged long before, the railroads were by nature monopolistic and thus wielded disproportionate power over the prices farmers paid to have their goods shipped to market. Further, railroad access helped determine which companies would succeed or fail. In certain cases, such as the beef industry, railway transportation heavily favored large companies that could afford the massive capital investments for stockyards and refrigerated railcars needed to do business by rail. This high barrier to entry fostered the development of an agricultural oligopoly, the so-called Beef Trust. Only when independent truckers became a force did this framework begin to crumble and to take down...

POVERTY, POLICY REFORMS FOR RESOURCE-USE AND ECONOMIC EFFICIENCY: NEGLECTED ISSUES

It is widely believed that in developing countries, open-access to natural resources, inadequate private property rights, and lack of development of market systems add to the incidence of poverty. Increased economic efficiency is seen as a powerful force for reducing the extent of poverty in developing countries in the long run. While this may be so, it ignores the depth and incidence of poverty that can be generated during adjustments to policy reforms. This possibility constrains policy choices as shown theoretically on natural resource policies and agricultural adjustment policies with Asian examples. Social, behavioral, and institutional features are also considered as they may result in the poverty lock-in of some groups. It is essential to consider dynamic processes and not to rely solely on comparative statics when assessing economic policies to reduce poverty and increase economic efficiency. It is also important to take into account the institutional constraints on policy choices.

Performing the Promise of Plenty in the USDA's 1933–34 World's Fair Exhibits

The New Deal Department of Agriculture maintained that reducing agricultural output would create stable access to desirable foods and economic prosperity. This essay elucidates how the food displays in the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) exhibits at the 1933–34 World's Fair in Chicago promoted this argument by creating the impression that the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) would restore the land of plenty. To accomplish this objective, narratives of advances in the food system were constructed in ways that stimulated visitors to perform as American consumers; fair-goers engaged in an embodied experience of food security as provided by AAA.

Adjustment strategies revisited: Agricultural change in the Welsh Marches

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, much attention was paid by British agricultural geographers to the restructuring of the farm sector under pressures of national, European and global change. The need to adopt a perspective capable of looking beyond the farm gate inspired the introduction of modified political economy approaches into agricultural research. One important cornerstone of the empirical application of this thesis was the concept of the ‘farm adjustment strategy’. This attempted to map out the responses, especially those of survival, made by farm family businesses to rapidly changing agrarian conditions. Subsequently, the farm adjustment strategy became remarkable for its popularity as a way to organise research into agricultural change in developed market economies. Following a retreat in the 1990s, there has been something of a recent revival in the use of the term ‘strategy’ relating to agricultural adjustment. Revisiting this concept is therefore timely. Using empirical evidence from studies of farming change in the Welsh Marches, this paper examines two issues. First, it makes a critical re-examination of the concept to resolve differences with interpretation linked to theoretical perspectives so that future misuse can be minimised. Second, an attempt is made to assess the relevance of defined elements of farm adjustment strategies to analyses of farm business change. In so doing, there is an attempt to recover our knowledge of agrarian restructuring and to help situate newly encultured investigations into the likely survival of family labour-based forms of production.

International Labor Migration from a Tropical Development Frontier: Globalizing Households and an Incipient Forest Transition

This study documents labor migration and its impacts on household income, material well-being, and land-use practices in Mexico’s southern Yucatan and examines the relation of labor migration to local forest recovery. Drawing on a 203-household survey in 14 communities, we contrast migrating and non-migrating households, showing that migration earnings substitute for agricultural earnings and that migrating households cultivate significantly less farmland. A larger percentage of migrating households maintain pasture, but, on average, not more hectares. These dynamics are consistent with the decline in deforestation registered in the area for the year 2000. Incipient local forest recovery is considered in light of current forest transition theory, with an examination of three hypothesized paths to forest recovery: economic development, forest scarcity, and smallholder agricultural adjustment. The southern Yucatan case illustrates the need to explicitly incorporate the role of globalizing household economies into forest transition theory.

The Great Depression in High School Social Science Textbooks : Critiques and Suggestions

The Great Depression is one of the most important economic incidents in the twentieth century. A significant and long-lasting impact of this event is the rise of the government intervention to the economy. Under the catastrophic downturn of the economic condition worldwide, people required their government to play an active role for economic recovery, and this mentalite prolonged even after the Second World War. Social science textbooks taught at Korean high schools mostly referred to the Great Depression for explaining the reason of government intervention in economy. However, the mainstream view commonly found in the textbooks provides a misleading theological interpretation. It argues that inherent flaws of the market economy causes over-production/under-consumption, and that this mismatch ends up with economic crisis. The chaotic situation was resolved by substitution of the governments for the market, and the New Deal was introduced as the monumental example (‘laissez-faire economy→over-production→the Great Depression→government intervention→economic recovery’). Based on economic historians’ researches for past three decades, I argue that this mainstream view commits the fallacy of ex-post justification. Unlike what the mainstream view claims, the Great Depression was neither the result of the ‘market failure’, nor the recovery from the Great Depression but was due to successful government policies. For substantiating this claim, I suggest three points. First, blaming the weakness or instability of the market economy as the cause of the Great Depression is groundless. Unlike what the textbooks describe, the rise of the U.S. stock price during the 1920s cannot be said as a bubble, and there was no sign of under-consumption during the 1920s. On the contrary, a new consensus emerging from the 1980s among economic historians illustrates that the Great Depression was originated from ‘the government failure’ rather than from the ‘market failure’. Policymakers of European countries tried to return to the gold standard regime before the First World War, but discrepancies between this policy and the reality made the world economy vulnerable. Second, the mainstream view identifies the New Deal as Keynesian interventionism and glorifies it for saving the U.S. economy from the crisis. However, this argument is not true. The New Deal was not Keynesian at all. What the U.S. government actually tried was not macroeconomic stabilization but price and quantity control. In addition, New Deal did not brought about economic recovery that people generally believe. Even after the New Deal, industrial production or employment level remained quite low until the late 1930s. Lastly, studies on individual New Deal policies show that they did not work as they were intended. For example, the National Industrial Recovery Act increased unemployment, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act expelled tenants from their land. Third, the mainstream view characterizes the economic order before the Great Depression as laissez-faire, and it tends to attribute all the vice during the Industrial Revolution era to the uncontrolled market economy. However, historical studies show that various economic and social problems of the Industrial Revolution period such as inequality problems, child labor, or environmental problems cannot be simply ascribed to the problems of the market economy. In conclusion, the remedy for all these problems in high school textbooks is not to use the Great Depression as an example showing the weakness of the market economy. The Great Depression should be introduced simply as a historical momentum that had initiated the growth of government intervention. This reform of high school textbooks is imperative for enhancing the right understanding of economy and history.

Agriculture adjustment, land-use transition and protected areas in Northwestern Argentina

Land-use change is the main component of regional environmental change, while protected areas represent a direct land use policy to prevent its potentially negative effects on biodiversity and environmental services. We combined an analysis of trends in land use and human demography with trends in creation of protected areas during the last three decades in northwestern Argentina, a subtropical region including a wide range of environments. The eighty nine administrative analysis units of the region were classified into four ecological groups based on their percentage of cover by the six eco-regions of the study area: (1) “Dry valleys”; dominated by Middle-elevation deserts; (2) “Highlands”, dominated by High-elevation alpine zones and plateaus; (3) “Humid ecosystems”, dominated by Foggy grasslands and Humid forests, and (4) “Dry forests”. Between 1970 and 2002, human population became concentrated in urban areas and land use trends varied greatly among the four ecological groups. Agricultural area decreased in the Highlands and increased in the other regions, particularly in the Dry forests. Domestic animals decreased in Humid ecosystems, Highlands and the Dry valleys; and remained constant in the Dry forests. Several protected areas were created, but most of them were established in regions undergoing a decreasing intensity of land use. Overall, the analysis shows that agricultural production is becoming concentrated in the areas more suitable for modern agriculture while marginal agriculture areas and, particularly, extensive grazing are decreasing. The creation of protected areas reflects the decreasing opportunity costs of marginal areas and is failing to protect the eco-regions most threatened by current land-use trends.

DAVID CIEPLEY. Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 379. $49.95

This is a bold and ambitious book. David Ciepley argues that U.S. encounters with communist and fascist dictatorships during the 1930s and 1940s revolutionized American governance, law, and intellectual life, transforming the very meaning of liberalism and of America itself. The rise to political salience of an antitotalitarian ideology that viewed all statism as a threat to individual freedom harkened a shift from a nineteenth and early twentieth-century liberal variant (dubbed “virtue progressivism”), which had reached its apogee in such New Deal initiatives as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, to a revived strain of eighteenth-century “autonomous” liberalism that, in the postwar period, manifested as the embodiment of freedom a “neutralist” state that eschewed “substantive values” and conceived government as a disinterested arbiter among competing interest groups. This “libertarian” turn in politics toward “moral minimalism” and “hyperpluralism” paralleled a rightward shift in economic thought, social science theory, and especially jurisprudence, as the U.S. Supreme Court effectively “[recast] civil liberty and due process as protections against the imposition of values by government” (p. 25). Ironically, however, while the totalitarian encounter pushed American liberalism toward antistatism, “this has not meant the elimination of authority from American life” but rather the empowerment of those institutions—namely “courts and corporations”—that “do the best job of concealing its exercise” (p. 31). Ciepley's prescription for democracy's ebb (which admittedly has few prospects, given ongoing “culture wars” that reference antitotalitarian ideologies on the Right and Left) is to reignite a “sociology of virtue” to animate a “new progressive era” in American politics. Far-sighted twenty-first-century leaders might make good on the promise of a “developmental state” that had nearly reached fruition during the 1930s but was derailed by the rise of fascism and communism and an attendant, paralyzing fear of state power gone amok.

Rural Households, Dragon Heads and Associations: A Case Study of Sweet Potato Processing in Sichuan Province

AbstractIn recent years Chinese government policies and research programmes have advocated agricultural industrialization in order to raise demand for farm products, facilitate structural adjustment in agriculture, create rural employment and increase farm incomes. But although agro-industrial activities have become a key feature of China's rural development strategy, the agricultural industrialization policy has been little studied outside China. This article is a case study of the implementation of agricultural industrialization and its impact on rural livelihoods in Sichuan province. It identifies and analyses two major forms of agricultural industrialization: “dragon head enterprises” and “rural associations.” Although agro-industrial development is likely to be a critical determinant of China's future social and economic trajectory, the preliminary analysis given here shows a mixed picture. Positive effects include increases in both income and employment. But there is also a negative dimension, shown by the existence of numerous entry barriers, unequal bargaining power and an uneven distribution of benefits.

The Shelterbelt Project: Cooperative Conservation in 1930s America

During the Shelterbelt Project of the 1930s, foresters trained and instilled with Progressive-era values confronted an uncooperative public and nature on the Great Plains. Foresters assumed planting trees in shelterbelts was primarily a scientific and technical task. However, they quickly compro mised technical guidelines in the face of bureaucratic pressure and local desire. Foresters assumed compromise undermined technical success, but this was too simple an explanation. In some cases, such as the overuse of cottonwood, public pressure undermined long-term success, but in other cases, such as the narrowing of belt width, public pressure improved long term prospects. Public unwillingness to engage in drawn-out and uncertain solutions and a bureaucratic refusal to open up the planning process con sistently undermined the overall success of the project. Conservation plan ning in a democratic state is inherently multifaceted: political and social realities demand equal billing with technical ones, and natural and scientific uncertainties require that conservation planning be a process, rather than an immediate solution. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S FIRST major experiments in cooperative conservation began during the early years of the Dust Bowl. In 1933 the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, set about searching for solutions-or at least palliatives-to the growing economic and envi ronmental disaster on the Great Plains. Typically, President Roosevelt encouraged a multitude of competing plans, including new agencies like the Soil Conservation Service and Agricultural Adjustment Administra tion, and new projects within old agencies like the Shelterbelt Project of the Forest Service. As the largest agency with the longest history of JOEL ORTH teaches history and is the social sciences teaching credential advisor at Cal Poly State University-San Luis Obispo. He received his MA and PhD from the Agricul tural History and Rural Studies Program at Iowa State University. This article is based on material from his dissertation The Conservation Landscape: Trees and Nature on the Great Plains, which won the 2004 Fite Award for the best dissertation on rural and agricultural history.

Impacts of policy related to structural adjustment of agriculture on grain supply in China

China's policy on structural adjustment of its agriculture is an effective instrument for increasing agricultural production and developing the rural economy. The policy interventions used included converting cultivated land from growing grain crops to cash crops and increasing the production of meat, eggs and milk. The impacts of these changes on grain supply between 1998 and 2004 are identified and quantified at national and regional levels. The data on cultivated land diverted to other purposes are presented for the benefit of the decision maker. The paper concludes that the policy had significant impacts on China's grain supply, which declined by 14.4% of the total grain output in 1998. However, nearly 40% of the cultivated land at national level could potentially be converted by 2010. Regional disparities in the extent of the reduction in grain supply and in land conversion are highlighted with reference to different economic conditions and policy directions.

World trade as the adjustment mechanism of agriculture to climate change

This paper evaluates the role of trade as a mechanism of economic adjustment to the impacts of climate change on agriculture. The study uses a model of the world economy able to reflect changes in comparative advantage; the model is used to test the hypotheses that trade can assure that, first, satisfying global agricultural demand will not be jeopardized, and, second, general access to food will not decrease. The hypotheses are tested for three alternative scenarios of climate change; under each scenario, regions adjust to the climatic assumptions by changing the land areas devoted to agriculture and the mix of agricultural goods produced, two of the major mechanisms of agricultural adaptation. We find that trade makes it possible to satisfy the world demand for agricultural goods under the changed physical conditions. However, access to food decreases in some regions of the world. Other patterns also emerge that indicate areas of concern in relying on trade as a mechanism for the adjustment of agriculture to likely future changes in climate.

Historical Trends in China's Virtual Water Trade

Increasing water scarcity in China demands a more detailed analysis of water use in different sectors. In this paper, China's food import and export levels are analyzed in light of water availability. Their contributions to national water management in the form of virtual water are also evaluated. The findings show that the virtual water trade has developed unconsciously. This trend has been greatly influenced by micro- and macro-economic conditions, as well as fluctuations in weather conditions. Given the intensification of water scarcity, future food policy should promote an active application of virtual water strategies (such as virtual water trade and agricultural structure adjustment) to improve food security and sustainable water uses. With the progressive liberalization of food markets in China, virtual water trade is likely to play a more important role in future water resources management.

The Judicial Service of Retired United States Supreme Court Justices

The Judicial Service of Retired United States Supreme Court Justices MINOR MYERS III Introduction Biographies of Supreme Court Justices generally devote little attention to the period following retirement. For many Supreme Court Justices, though, departure from the Court is not the end of their service on the federal courts. As Justice Willis Van Devanter noted following his retirement in 1937, “I am still a judge.”1 Justices, like lower court judges, may as­ sume senior status and sit by designation of the ChiefJustice in any circuit or district in the federal system. Most commonly, they do so on the courts ofappeals. Justice Lewis Powell, for instance, sat regularly as a retired Justice on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in his native Virginia. Rarely, a retired Justice will preside at trial; only Justice Van Devanter and Justice Tom C. Clark sat on district courts after leaving the Bench. While others have looked at Justices’ de­ cisions to leave the Bench and their final years on the Bench,2 no one has previously endeav­ ored to examine the senior service of retired Justices. This article fills that tiny gap by ex­ amining the service of those Supreme Court Justices who in retirement have sat on the lower federal courts. Itbegins by detailingthe history ofthe senior-status provisions, which first ap­ plied to Supreme Court Justices in 1937. Next, it examines the judicial service of those Jus­ tices who have elected to serve on the lower courts after assuming senior status. Of the thirty-five Justices who have assumed senior status, nine have sat on the lowercourts. It con­ cludes by touching on some novel points of interest. JUDICIAL SERVICE OF RETIRED JUSTICES 47 Brief History of Senior Status for the Supreme Court Though judges on federal circuit and district courts were given the option to take senior sta­ tus in 1919, Supreme Court Justices were not eligible to do so until 1937. Congress created the first retirement pro­ visions for federal judges in 1869? Prior to that time, as Justices aged and the duties of the postbecame more difficult, some neverthe­ less held on to their seat to continue receiving the salary.4 Of the twenty-four Justices who departed the Court between 1801 and 1868, twenty ended their service only upon their death? Under the 1869 retirement scheme, a Justice or judge who was 70 years of age or older and had at least ten years of service on the court could retire and continue to receive his salary for life, but he was no longer a part ofthe operation ofthe court of appointment. The 1937 reforms, which set out the basic framework that currently applies to Supreme Court retirements, grew out of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan. In 1935, the Supreme Court invalidated portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act,6 and in the following year it struck down portions of the Agricultural Adjustment Act,7 both impor­ tant components ofRoosevelt’s New Deal. De­ terminedto see his programs upheld, Roosevelt on February 5, 1937 announced his plan to re­ organize the federal judiciary. The most con­ troversial aspect ofthe plan was his proposal to add one Justice to the Supreme Court for each Justice over age seventy who does not retire. The practical effect ofthis would have been to allow Roosevelt to fill the Supreme Court with enough new Justices to upholdNew Deal legis­ lation. Though its prospects appeared promis­ ing atfirstbecause Roosevelt’sDemocrats held majorities in both houses of Congress, the proposal soon encountered trouble. Many in Congress came to support a mandatory retire­ ment age for Justices, but Roosevelt would not compromise? The 1937 Retirement Act was passed on March 1, 1937,9 and its proponents hoped it would siphon offsupport for Roosevelt’s plan. Under the statute, retiring Justices not only would continue to receive their salary, but also could assume senior status. This would permit them, although no longer in regular active ser­ vice, to continue to be federal judges and to serve episodically on lower federal courts.10 On May 18, 1937, Justice Van Devanter, one ofthe conservative Justices known as the Four Horseman, announced that he would retire, making...