Through the Centuries
In the eighteenth century, the Supreme Court produced few important rulings. The justices spent a good deal of time on administrative functions as they tried to figure out the role of the Court. It wasn't until the landmark decision of Marbury v. Madison in 1803 (discussed in Chapter 13) that the Court began to assert itself.
How many justices originally sat on the Supreme Court?
In its first year of existence, the Court had five justices. This number changed six times before Congress finally settled on the current total of nine justices in 1869. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt tried to increase the bench to fifteen members, but Congress rejected his “court-packing” plan.
Nineteenth-Century Court
From 1801 through 1835, Chief Justice John Marshall — the longest-serving chief justice in history — guided the Court through a period of rapid expansion in its power. Marshall was a strong believer in the pre-eminence of the federal government, and his views pervaded the Court's decisions. Despite early political resistance to Marshall's activist Court, his rulings came to be accepted by the other branches of government.
John Marshall's successor, Chief Justice Roger Taney, presided over a markedly different Court. The Taney Court took a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, finding fewer federal powers and more states' rights than did the Marshall Court. Its philosophy led to the Dred Scott decision of 1857, considered by many to be the low point in Supreme Court jurisprudence. Scott ruled that slaves were not citizens of the United States, and that federal laws limiting slavery violated the Constitution. Scott was later overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Over the next seventy years, the Supreme Court continued to look suspiciously at the growth of the federal government. It overturned a series of laws and regulations aimed at the economy, and crafted extremely narrow interpretations of the Civil Rights Amendments. One such decision was the Slaughterhouse case of 1873, which held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect the right to private property. A quarter century later in Plessy v. Ferguson, the court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment did not prohibit public segregation by law, so long as it was “separate but equal.” The doctrine survived until 1954, when the Supreme Court reversed itself in Brown v. Board of Education.
Twentieth-Century Court
During Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, the Supreme Court underwent another dramatic transformation. As justices hostile to the New Deal began retiring, Roosevelt replaced them with liberal jurists who believed that the federal government had broad power to regulate commerce and the economy.
With the exception of Jimmy Carter, every twentieth-century president named at least one justice to the Supreme Court. Franklin Roosevelt appointed eight during his thirteen years in office, far and away the most of any president. During his one year in office, President Warren G. Harding had the good fortune of making two appointments.
Over the next forty years, the Supreme Court aggressively pursued an agenda of expanded civil rights, civil liberties, and business regulation. Brown v. Board of Education ended school segregation; Gideon v. Wainwright created the right to counsel in criminal proceedings; Miranda v. Arizona established that police must inform suspected criminals of their rights (known as the Miranda Rights); and Roe v. Wade expanded the right to privacy to include the right to an abortion.
Under the stewardship of current Chief Justice William Rehnquist, the Court has shed its activist past and moved back toward a more narrow interpretation of the Constitution. The Rehnquist Court has eroded some of the criminal rights established by previous Courts, and has chipped away at the right to privacy, including abortion. Still, the current Court seems to be as equally divided as the electorate on many of great political issues of the day.
