Along the same lines of Zainab's inquiry, I too found myself thinking about the Great Depression's effect of this change in constitutional interpretation. In reflecting on whether or not the Court would have changed its mind otherwise, I started thinking about corporate personhood; more specifically about the effect that corporate personhood has in the larger legal battles in the climate/environmental sphere. While the Court may not have explicitly considered the effect that corporate personhood would have on the environment and the exacerbation of climate change (I don't know this for certain because I haven't read the governing CP cases, but I will assume for the sake of argument that they didn't), it appears (we would hope) clear now that assigning personhood to corporations has created power imbalances between businesses and the environment such that the health or well-being of the environment is an interest placed far below that of the health and well-being of businesses and their shareholders. This brought me to a more central consideration of the fine line the Court seems to be walking continuously throughout history between promoting capitalism as a philosophy of American jurisprudence and needing to respond in what we can call "Great Depression"s in order not to completely lose its legitimacy and reliability from the general public. In slow-moving disasters such as the climate "crisis", what is the environment's "Great Depression"? At some point in the dystopian future, will the Court have to backpedal concepts such as corporate personhood in the same way it abandoned Lochner? Or would the arrival of such a dystopian future suggest that capitalism has reached such a late stage that the Court had never and would never change its allegiance?
This is such an insightful connection. It may be that slow-moving crises don’t create the same kind of pressure for doctrinal change, but history suggests the Court eventually reacts when the gap between legal abstractions and lived reality becomes too wide to ignore.
After reading this intriguing post regarding early 20th century constitutional law the question I keep asking myself if the Supreme Court would have changed its mind about "freedom of contract" if the Great Depression never happened. Noticeably, for years the court had make it seem like both workers and big companies were on equal footing, making it seem like workers facing starvation had the same freedom to "negotiate" like the corporate powers in that day and age. Once the Great Depression showed how absurd that thought process is , showing how "liberty of conduct" actually meant taking any job that comes your way or seeing your family starve, this fictional legal ideology collapsed through all this suffering. So, I am wondering if it is the judicial philosophy that changed Nebbia v. New York or the reality of the economy that became too loud to ignore. The Constitution did not fundamentally change - but the thought processes of the Country did - which, in a way could be a reckoning in itself?
Funny, I was contemplating something very similar to this just yesterday.
One possibility is that the Depression exposed why the Lochner judicial philosophy was wrong. Another is that it pushed the justices to interpret the Constitution with more compassion and pragmatism.
The bigger lesson here: the meaning of the Constitution isn’t shaped only by legal theory; it’s also shaped by what people are going through. And when real-life suffering gets too big to ignore, even long-standing legal ideas can fall apart.
Along the same lines of Zainab's inquiry, I too found myself thinking about the Great Depression's effect of this change in constitutional interpretation. In reflecting on whether or not the Court would have changed its mind otherwise, I started thinking about corporate personhood; more specifically about the effect that corporate personhood has in the larger legal battles in the climate/environmental sphere. While the Court may not have explicitly considered the effect that corporate personhood would have on the environment and the exacerbation of climate change (I don't know this for certain because I haven't read the governing CP cases, but I will assume for the sake of argument that they didn't), it appears (we would hope) clear now that assigning personhood to corporations has created power imbalances between businesses and the environment such that the health or well-being of the environment is an interest placed far below that of the health and well-being of businesses and their shareholders. This brought me to a more central consideration of the fine line the Court seems to be walking continuously throughout history between promoting capitalism as a philosophy of American jurisprudence and needing to respond in what we can call "Great Depression"s in order not to completely lose its legitimacy and reliability from the general public. In slow-moving disasters such as the climate "crisis", what is the environment's "Great Depression"? At some point in the dystopian future, will the Court have to backpedal concepts such as corporate personhood in the same way it abandoned Lochner? Or would the arrival of such a dystopian future suggest that capitalism has reached such a late stage that the Court had never and would never change its allegiance?
This is such an insightful connection. It may be that slow-moving crises don’t create the same kind of pressure for doctrinal change, but history suggests the Court eventually reacts when the gap between legal abstractions and lived reality becomes too wide to ignore.
After reading this intriguing post regarding early 20th century constitutional law the question I keep asking myself if the Supreme Court would have changed its mind about "freedom of contract" if the Great Depression never happened. Noticeably, for years the court had make it seem like both workers and big companies were on equal footing, making it seem like workers facing starvation had the same freedom to "negotiate" like the corporate powers in that day and age. Once the Great Depression showed how absurd that thought process is , showing how "liberty of conduct" actually meant taking any job that comes your way or seeing your family starve, this fictional legal ideology collapsed through all this suffering. So, I am wondering if it is the judicial philosophy that changed Nebbia v. New York or the reality of the economy that became too loud to ignore. The Constitution did not fundamentally change - but the thought processes of the Country did - which, in a way could be a reckoning in itself?
Funny, I was contemplating something very similar to this just yesterday.
One possibility is that the Depression exposed why the Lochner judicial philosophy was wrong. Another is that it pushed the justices to interpret the Constitution with more compassion and pragmatism.
The bigger lesson here: the meaning of the Constitution isn’t shaped only by legal theory; it’s also shaped by what people are going through. And when real-life suffering gets too big to ignore, even long-standing legal ideas can fall apart.