Curriculum Guide · Courses

Professor Daniel Ernst

J.D. Seminar 626 | 3 credit hours

The Great Recession of 2007-2010 encouraged many to look to the past for insight on how the American legal order should respond to a severe economic downturn. The most frequently considered source of inspiration was the first two presidential administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For many years the New Deal had been Old Hat, reviled for its statist excesses by Reaganite conservatives and deplored for its bureaucratic rigidities by the New Left. Suddenly, the great constitutional and legal transformations of 1933-1941 spoke directly to the present. This seminar takes up many of these changes: the creation of new federal programs of social insurance, regulation, and public investment; the blazing, by a generation of young law graduates, of a new path into the profession through what had previously been considered a wasteland of government employment; the birth of modern administrative law; a reorientation of judicial activism from the defense of free markets and private property to the safeguarding of civil rights and civil liberties; and a great duel between President Roosevelt and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, known to history as the “Court-packing” plan of 1937. Over the course of the semester, students will read historical monographs (commencing with Eric Rauchway’s The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction). They will write a 600- to 1,000-word review of one of the books and a research paper fulfilling the Upperclass Legal Writing Requirement on some aspect of the legal history of the New Deal, broadly considered. Class meetings will be devoted to lectures, discussions of the assigned readings, progress reports on students’ research and writing, and a concluding “roundtable” discussion of common issues raised by the first drafts.