Referring to the number of justices on the court, one newspaper humorist called it “the switch in time that saved nine”. Those rulings led to Roosevelt’s unsuccessful plan to expand the size of the court, which in turn led the court to reverse its position on the New Deal, suddenly upholding social security and the National Labor Relations Act. In May 1935, the “Black Monday decisions” obliterated key parts of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, including striking down the National Recovery Administration. The civil war started just four years after the court held in Dred Scott that African Americans could not sue in federal court because they could not be citizens of the United States. Waldman describes how earlier extreme decisions of the court provoked gigantic national backlashes. These decisions were the work “of a little group of willful men and women, ripping up long-settled aspects of American life for no reason beyond the fact that they can”. And it hobbled the ability of government agencies to protect public health and safety and stop climate change.” It radically loosened curbs on guns, amid an epidemic of mass shootings. Waldman writes: “It overturned Roe v Wade … putting at risk all other privacy rights.
His new book focuses on three horrendous decisions the court rendered at the end of its term one year ago, but it includes a brisk history of the court’s last 200 years, from the disastrous lows of Dred Scott v Sandford (1857) and Plessy v Ferguson (1896) to the highs of Brown v Board of Education (1954) and Obergefell v Hodges (2015).īut the longest analysis is devoted to those three days in June 2022 when the court “crammed decades of social change into three days”. Waldman is also a learned lawyer, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and a talented popular historian.
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