Word: court
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Frank Murphy, ex-governor of Michigan, onetime Attorney General, the court's only Roman Catholic, a man of humanitarian impulses without the intellectual drive and capacity to make himself highly effective...
Harold Burton, ex-mayor of Cleveland, ex-Senator from Ohio, the lone Republican, a close friend of Harry Truman who appointed him. An amiable man, outpaced by his hard-running colleagues, generally regarded as the least effective justice on the court...
...curious that the justices had not been in the headlines oftener than they were. The answer was that their arguments were largely intramural; they had not got in spectacular knockdown fights with other branches of Government, as for example, had their predecessors, the Nine Old Men. That court, dominated by McReynolds, Van Devanter, Sutherland and Butler, defiantly stood against a social revolution. This court was part of the revolution...
True, they fixed Big Business with a cold and fishy stare. Some patent lawyers were inclined to believe that a patent-holder's case was as good as lost if it ever reached the Supreme Court. The court cracked down on anything that looked like collusive price-fixing. Tax lawyers were chiefly concerned with keeping their cases out of the highest court's hands...
...court had not rushed in to grapple with any great constitutional problems. One of the justices called its course a policy of "self-denial." In the twelve years, only two congressional measures-neither of them major-had been declared unconstitutional. The court merely nibbled around the edges of the big, still unresolved questions, leaving it to time and changing customs to determine the ultimate shape of things. The nibbling was deliberate, and not the result of timidity. Rebuking by implication their immediate predecessors, the present justices insisted that it was Congress' job to legislate, not the court...