ic growth and social change and endured severe boom and bust cycles during which social tensions among the classes intensified. The American legal system largely bent to accommodate the interests of the most powerful economic interests. In a long series of cases, the Supreme Court used the Commerce, Due Process (5th and 14th Amendments) and Contract Clauses of the Constitution to protect commercial interests against state interference.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field dominated judicial thinking during the first 20 years after the end of the Civil War. He saw the courts as a neutral force, whose principal function was to level the economic playing field so that the private and public sectors could cooperate in the public interest. He sought, said McCurdy (1975), through his 'public-use' doctrine to impose "constitutional limitations on the exercise of the state's inherent powers" (255). Some constitutional scholars, such as Thomas Cooley (1868), constructed a theory of jurisprudence which preached non-intervention by the courts into private property rights which he held to be sacrosanct (341). Law professor Christopher Langdell (1880) used the case method of instruction to enable students to gain "mastery . . . of certain [immutable and rational] principles and doctrines" (716). Roscoe Pound later decried this type of legal philosophy as mechanical jurisprudence, unresponsive to societal needs. Pound (1931) said: "Law is more than a body of devices for business purposes, just as it is more than a body of rules for the guidance of courts" (npn).
In practice, rulings of the high court were often pragmatic and took many twists and turns. Despite its predilection toward the protection of private property and liberty of contract, the Court permitted the states a fair degree of latitude in the exercise of their police powers. In Munn v. Illinois (1877), the Court acknowledged the power of the states to regulate economic activitie...