THE AMERICAN SUPREME COURT

McCloskey said that it was his goal to provide "a coherent view of what the Court is up to at any given time" (16). He does much more than that by explaining the reasons why the Court developed as it did within the unique concept of federal-state relationships which stemmed from the constitutional debates of 1787. He says that "from 1789 until the Civil War . . . the dominant interest of the Supreme Court was in the greatest of all questions left unsolved by the founders-the nation-state relationship" (17). He says that in many respects "the intentions of the framers [of the Constitution] were ambiguous," requiring the Court to interp

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took a particularly harsh stand was towards state regulation of wages and hours, as exemplified by the decision in Lochner v. New York (1905) to void a New York law which capped the working hours of bakers. McCloskey characterizes this trend as an example of judicial elitism, the use of the flexible standard of the due process clause "to invalidate any law that struck a majority of its members as arbitrary or capricious" (102). The Court was rapidly getting out of sync with the dominant public mood which through the efforts of the muckrakers was becoming aware in the early 1900s of the excesses of industrial capitalism. The Court then tacked its sails and allowed states greater regulatory latitude. One device it used was the test of "public interest" first enunciated in Munn v. Illinois (1877) under which rates of industries "judicially classified as falling within the rubric of 'public interest'", . . . "could be subjected to some measure of government control" (105). The tendency of the Court to engage in a priori reasoning to support its conservative views, was especially pronounced in the 1920s and early 1930s, such as in Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923) where a D.C. law setting minimum wages for women and minors was st
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Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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