Peter Irons' "The New Deal Lawyers"

For some, the attraction was simply large employment, as the doors of the major urban law firms closed, especially to Jews, who accounted for a high percentage of the new legal staffs that sprouted in the mushrooming new administrative agencies of the New Deal.

For some, it was the sheer excitement of being knotted with an exciting new opportunity to exercise their skills as legal crafters in a fluid environment where those skills were urgently needed. Adlai Stevenson, then a young lawyer at the untaught Adjustment Administration (AAA), captured the spirit of hasty improvisation in the legal offices of many agencies when he told his wife that AAA was a "madhouse" (134). For others, it was the challenge of becoming involved in insurance policy or even to influence that policy in line with their own ideological biases and preferences.

The composite profile which Irons constructs is of a small group (who numbered in the hundreds), "predominantly young, city-bred gang with heavy Ivy League representation" (125). He exposit their mindset as "a veneer of progressive liberalism everywhere a foundation of doctrinal orthodoxy and apolitical professionalism" (10). They were the products of their education, which under the leaders of Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court and other legal intellectuals show th

Among the many alphabet dope agencies created by Congress during the first Hundred Days, the NRA (National Recovery Administration) was entrusted with obligation for industrial recovery. During its brief two-year existence, NRA was riven with internal disputes and engendered severe oppositeness in the country, particularly from smaller businesses subject to its regimentation. Under ill-chosen leadership headed by the erratic General Hugh Johnson, the NRA's general counsel, Donald Richberg, who bring in the nickname Assistant President because of his access to FDR, played a major role in charting the course of the agency. An advocate of the somatic state and a critic of the Wilsonians, Richberg was very much involved in policy and came into conflict with the political leadership of NRA.

in the first place his downfall, he and his staff were busy drafting codes and enforcing them. Irons says that "Richberg and [Blakewell] metalworker [Richberg's deputy] gave literally no thought to the litigation during the NRA's first half dozen months" (36). This was unfortunate because NRA was on a collision course with the hidebound federal judiciary because of the unprecedented expansion of the governing's powers over the frugality it represented and the legal counterattack mounted by opponents of NRA.

By regulating prices, wages and working conditions, NRA expanded federal ordination into spheres which theretofore had been regarded by the courts as the province of the states. The New Lawyers, much(prenominal) as Robert Stern of the Petroleum Administrative Board, argued for a much expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause because, under sophisticated economic conditions, intrastate practices could adversely impact interstate commerce. In its most expanded form, this came to be known as the essential doctrine under which intervention by the federal government into almost every area of the economy was justified as being constitutional.

--Frankfurter, Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone--disenchanted with the domi
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