The New Deal Lawyers

An important subtheme is their personal struggles to achieve professional identity and to satisfy their career ambitions amid the turmoil of the early New Deal, their conflicts with their political bosses, inter-agency jurisdictional rivalries and conflicts and their impact on their profession as well as on government itself. The weaknesses of the book are its focus on sometimes minor matters, its overemphasis on litigation and Irons' own evident bias against the work product of his subjects--the massive central government which emerged after 1937 from their work as master builders of the welfare state.

As the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt groped its way toward a coherent philosophy and program to cope with the formidable problems p

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rcement and their lack of a coherent strategy for selecting test cases to bring before the Supreme Court. He points out that the effectiveness of the total government litigation effort was severely hampered by jurisdictional rivalries between the NRA legal staff and the more conservative Justice Department, which in 1934 barred all NRA lawyers from going into court. The cases which went to the Supreme Court were weak ones, such as the "hot oil" cases, in which the Court struck down portions of the NIRA as unconstitutionally overbroad delegations of legislative authority to NRA, and United States v. Schechter, in which the Court in May, 1935 held that NRA's codes regulating the poultry industry were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said that "extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power" and that the delegation by Congress in the relevant NRA codes "is uncommon to our law and is utterly inconsistent with the constitutional prerogatives and duties of Congress" (102). The Court's decision was unanimous because the liberals on the Court --Frankfurter, Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone--disenchanted with the dominance of NRA by big business and the lapse of antitrust enforcement, joined the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Commerce Clause, Supreme Court, Ivy League, Administration AAA, Delano Roosevelt, Adjustment Act, Smith Richberg's, Deal Lawyers, Court NLRB, Evans Hughes, supreme court, deal lawyers, due process, commerce clause, federal government, agricultural adjustment, labor relations, litigation strategy, role played, national labor, intervention federal government, adjustment administration aaa, court due process, labor relations act, jerome frank counsel,
Approximate Word count = 2584
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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