The Activist Legacy of the New Deal Court

The activist legacy of the New Deal Court was free-wheeling adjudication. It sprang from the Four Horsemen's obdurate identification of their economic and social predilections with constitutional mandates, halting the Rooseveltian reform measures in their tracks, and bringing on the Court-Packing Plan. Although the Plan failed, it was followed by a shake-out resulting in the "reconstructed Court,'' a Court that had learned from its predecessors how to manipulate the Constitution, albeit for a new set of goals.