The New Deal Lawyers

Peter H. Irons

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691000824, 9780691046884
• eBook ISBN: 9780691219646
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

From the perspective of young lawyers in three key New Deal agencies, this book traces the path of crucial constitutional test cases during the years from 1933 to 1937.

____________________ Notes ____________________

A number of frequently cited sources have been abbreviated in the notes. Those abbreviations are listed below:

CLMOH	Cornell Labor-Management Oral History
COHC	Columbia Oral History Collection
FDRL	Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
________OF	Official File
________PSF	President’s Secretary’s File
HLSL	Harvard Law School Library, Manuscript Division
LC	Library of Congress, Manuscript Division
NA	National Archives
________RG	Record Group

INTRODUCTION

1.295 U.S. 495 (1935); 297 U.S. 1 (1936); 301 U.S. 1 (1937).

2.See Barber, Presidential Character, and “The Interplay of Presidential Character and Style: A Paradigm and Five Illustrations,’’ in Greenstein and Lerner, eds., A Source Book for the Study of Personality and Politics, 386.

3.This group of ninety-five lawyers includes those who were directly involved in the litigation discussed in this book; a good many other lawyers in these agencies, of course, participated in the litigation of other cases. The biographical data scattered through the book has been compiled from a number of sources, which include the Martindale-Hubbell Directory of Lawyers; Who’s Who in America; Who Was Who; Current Biography', obituaries in the New York Times; and personal correspondence.

4.The percentage of lawyers in each agency whose law school graduation date was 1925 or after is as follows: NRA, 67 percent; AAA, 76 percent; NLRB, 68 percent; and Justice Department, 42 percent. The percentage of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia graduates in each agency is as follows (Harvard graduates in parentheses): NRA, 43.8 percent (12.5); AAA, 72 percent (57.7); NLRB, 66.7 percent (38.1); Justice Department, 54.4 percent (43.8). In other words, AAA lawyers were the youngest and Justice Department lawyers the oldest; the AAA was the most Harvard-dominated and the NRA the least.

5.See Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, Chs. 5 (“Legal Realism”) and 9 (“Crisis in Jurisprudence”).

6.Course data is drawn from Columbia Law School catalogs, 1925-1935.

7.Course data is drawn from Yale Law School catalogs, 1925-1935. For a discussion of legal realism at Yale in the 1920s and 1930s, see Schlegel, “American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science: From the Yale Experience”; “American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science: The Singular Case of Underhill Moore.”

8.Course data is drawn from Harvard Law School catalogs, 1925-1935. Sutherland, The Law at Harvard, provides an authorized history of the law school and some discussion of faculty and curricular issues during this period. There is, so far, no good study of legal education during these crucial decades.

9.See the excellent capsule sketch of Frankfurter’s career in Lash, From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter, 3-98. A recent and highly provocative psychobiography of Frankfurter, labeling him “a textbook case of a neurotic personality,” is Hirsch, The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter, which discusses his New Deal role in Ch. 4. Frankfurter’s own recollections of this period, in Felix Frankfurter Reminisces, are largely unrevealing and occasionally unreliable.

10.On Frankfurter’s role in the “Red Scare,” see Irons, “‘Fighting Fair’: Zechariah Chafee, Jr., the Department of Justice, and the ‘Trial at the Harvard Club,’ ” See also Frankfurter, The Case of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Boys with their Hair Ablaze
• Section One: The Legal Politicians of the National Recovery Administration
• Section Two: The Legal Reformers of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration
• Section Three: The Legal Craftsmen of the National Labor Relations Board
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index