Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Publication Information
28 Green Bag 2d (2025).
Abstract
APRIL 25, 1938 WAS A BUSY DAY at the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court decided twelve cases by full opinion and six cases per curiam, granted certiorari in two cases and denied it in twenty-eight others, and denied two petitions for rehearing. The decision that received the most attention sustained a challenge to a directive of Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace setting maximum rates to be charged by commission men working at the Kansas City Stockyards. The Court found that the regulated parties had not been afforded a “full,” “fair and open hearing” before the rate order was promulgated. “As the hearing was fatally defective,” wrote Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, “the order of the Secretary was invalid.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the “strongly worded decision” “sharply rebuked” Secretary Wallace, and issued “a warning to Federal administrative and quasi-judicial agencies to conduct their regulatory activities and prosecutions so that businesses may have a fair hearing and a fair decision by an informed tribunal.” The Daily Boston Globe informed its readers that the Court had given Wallace “a verbal spanking.”
Conspicuously absent from all of these reports is any account of what would soon become by far the most famous case decided on that April Monday: Justice Louis D. Brandeis’s opinion for the majority in Erie Rail- road Co. v. Tompkins. That case overruled the 96-year-old precedent of Swift v. Tyson, and held that henceforth federal courts sitting in diversity were obliged to apply as rules of decision, in matters falling within state legislative jurisdiction, the common law of the relevant state as determined by that state’s highest court, rather than the “general law” as determined independently by federal courts. It was not until May 3, eight days after the decision’s announcement, that it was “rescued ... from obscurity by Arthur Krock of the New York Times.”
Recommended Citation
Barry Cushman,
The Erie Scoop,
28 Green Bag 2d (2025)..
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/1736
Comments
Abstract taken from introduction.