Debate on the Federal Judiciary

This documentary collection introduces readers to public debates on federal judicial authority in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The documents illustrate the contending and evolving views of lawyers, judges, legislators, legal scholars, and ordinary citizens on the judiciary's role in American constitutional government. The volume focuses on the debates sparked by legislative proposals to alter the organization, jurisdiction, and administration of the federal courts, as well as the tenure and authority of federal judges. Documents are drawn from a variety of governmental and nongovernmental sources, including congressional floor debates, testimony in congressional hearings, bar association meetings, public addresses, legal treatises, law reviews, and popular periodicals. The documents selected represent the most prevalent and influential ideas about the courts and are but an introduction to the breadth and depth of materials available on the history of the federal courts. This collection illuminates the many paths that were possible for the federal courts during a period of rapid social and economic change. The federal courts have not simply evolved in response to the needs of society-they are the product of political contests that reflect both competing economic and social interests and changing ideas about the role of the nation's courts in the American system of government. The speakers and writers in these documents believed that the stakes of these debates were high-that the organization, administration, and authority of the federal courts would have important consequences for core American governmental principles like separation of powers, political representation, and the rule of law. Between 1875 and 1939, the federal judiciary's role in American law, politics, and society grew dramatically. The federal courts took on new responsibilities as the United States became an urban, industrialized country with an economy characterized by large business corporations operating on a national scale. In the name of protecting the property rights of individuals and corporations, the Supreme Court gradually broadened its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the role of the federal courts as a check on state government power. Congress's expansion of federal court jurisdiction over civil suits based on diversity of citizenship along with the growth in new federal regulatory and criminal statutes in the early twentieth century led to an unprecedented amount of litigation before federal judges. The expanded authority of the federal judiciary became the subject of heated political debate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Southern Congressmen, already resentful of the federal government's Reconstruction era interventions on behalf of freed African Americans, saw the growing reach of federal courts as further evidence of encroaching federal power. By the 1870s and 1880s, southerners were joined by midwestern and western state lawmakers, judges, and lawyers angered that eastern financiers and corporations could force their citizens into federal courts, which they believed were more distant, expensive, and congested than state courts. They protested Supreme Court decisions nullifying state regulation of corporations and argued that the federal courts were infringing on the authority of state governments, and especially state courts, to govern themselves. Labor leaders throughout the country charged the federal courts with protecting the interests of business at the expense of workers. Congressional Democrats, local lawyers, and some progressive political reformers proposed legislation to restrict federal court jurisdiction, to limit the exercise of judicial review, and to weaken judicial equity powers. Court critics also proposed measures to make federal judges more accountable to the people through the election of judges and the popular recall of judicial decisions.