This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive or detailed history of the Supreme Court of the US (hereafter referred to either as The Court or SCOTUS), but rather a general overview. As such, there will likely be many blanket statements about a period of SCOTUS history/jurisprudence that may not hold true for all cases or justices during that time. Nevertheless, I feel that I am correctly and accurately representing the subject matter at hand.
The Court in its earliest days lacked any real prestige. The current sense that the judiciary is a coequal branch with equal powers to check and balance the other two branches was not exactly settled at the time.
* In fact, the Court was completely overlooked when it came to a physical building, so while the Congress and Presidency had their own buildings, the Court had to meet in a basement of the Capital building, and never had a structure of its own until the 1930s.
* At least one justice in the first Court resigned to accept a much more prestigious job (an ambassadorship, I believe).
* To make matters worse, the Court's decision in Chisholm v. Georgia, decided just two years after the Court began meeting and generally considered the most important of the first ten years, was overturned by the passage of the Eleventh Amendment in 1795.
It wasn't until John Marshall became the Chief Justice in 1801 that the Court gained its current place in the American system. Marshall served until 1835, and remains to this day the longest-serving Chief Justice and the third longest serving Justice.
* The Court's decision in Marbury v. Madison (1803) declared the power of judicial review, and over the next 30 years Marshall and his Court reached decision after decision that strengthened the federal government and limited the powers of states to act against federal law.
* Examples of this include the famous cases of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), which recognized that Congress had implied powers and protected Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce, respectively.
* In the last years of Marshall's service, the Court's power was undermined when their decisions in the Cherokee Nation and Worcester v. Georgia cases protecting the sovereignty of Native Americans were ignored by President Jackson, leading to the Trail of Tears.
Marshall's successor, Roger B. Taney, presided over a Court that reached many important decisions as well, but his tenure is perhaps best remembered by the Dred Scott decision.
* Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) remains among the most infamous decisions of SCOTUS. The central component of the ruling was that blacks were inferior and could never be US citizens and that the Missouri Compromise, which had outlawed slavery in the territories, was unconstitutional. It is interesting to note that this was only the second time the Court had declared an act of Congress unconstitutional (the first time being in Marbury 54 years earlier). The Dred Scott decision tarnished the Court's reputation for many decades and in many ways contributed to the outbreak of Civil War.
The Courts of the next few decades had an equally weak record with Civil Rights issues, as the Court ruled in the Slaughterhouse Cases that the newly-passed Fourteenth Amendment was essentially unenforceable against state action, thereby basically making it useless as law. Later, in the Court's now infamous 1896 decision in Plessy v. Feruson, SCOTUS held that racial segregation was constitutional, so long as the separate accommodations were essentially equal.
With the dawning of the 20th century, the question remained as to what would be the direction of the Court. Was it to continue its thus far dismal record on rights and constitutional enforcement or was it to take an active role in enforcing individual rights? In the early years of the century, the answer to that would have been that yes, SCOTUS was to take an activist stance, but arguably not in a positive manner. During what has become known as the "Lochner Era" (named for the 1905 case Lochner v New York) beginning in 1897 and continuing until 1937, the conservative Court struck down (usually by 5-4 margins) socially progressive legislation one by one. Laws they struck down included minimum wage laws, maximum work hour laws, protections for child and women labourers, etc. It seemed that the Court would forever be the enemy of liberty, despite its claims that these laws were being stricken down on account of an unenumerated Freedom of Contract.
This all changed with what has become known as the "Switch in time to save nine." It has been suggested that this was a result of Roosevelt's threats to "pack the Court" with liberals, but for whatever reason, the majority became 5-4 in support of upholding socially progressive laws, and with the appointment by Roosevelt of a number of justices, a new era in the Court's history began.
* Known as the Constitutional Revolution, the Court began what is known as the process of Selective Incorporation, whereby the Bill of Rights protections began to be applied to state action through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Essentially, what that means is that the Court began to take Civil liberties and Rights issues seriously.
* Perhaps the most important decision of the early Constitutional Revolution was West Virginia Board of Ed v. Barnette (1943), in which the Court declared that one could not be required to say the Pledge of Allegiance, ruling that the Freedoms of Religion, Speech, and Conscience are central to the American system.
The Constitutional Revolution reached its maturity, and arguably its high point, with Eisenhower's appointment of Earl Warren, the Republican Governor of CA, as Chief Justice.
* The Warren Court is often considered the greatest period in the Court's history by liberals, while it is deeply hated by many conservatives.
* The Warren Court's first majour decision was in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which SCOTUS ruled that "Separate But Equal is never equal," thereby striking down segregation as a legally enforceable institution. Unfortunately, the de-segregation order met with considerable resistance in the South, an example of which was the "Little Rock Nine" incident in 1957.
* Earl Warren considered the Reapportionment cases (Baker v. Carr [1962] and Reynolds v. Sims [1964]) to be his Court's most important decisions. In these cases, the Court declared that states could not have legislatures apportioned on an unequal basis, and that the Constitution required "One Man, One Vote."
* The Warren Court also reached decisions striking down school-sponsored prayer and bible study (Engel v. Vitale [1962] and Abington v. Schemmp [1963]), declaring a Right of Privacy (Griswald v. Connecticut [1965]), strengthening the rights of the accused (Miranda v. Arizona [1966] and Gideon v. Wainwright [1963]), etc.
As I mentioned earlier, not everyone agreed with the Warren Court's decisions, some decisions of which admittedly resting on unstable legal grounds.
* When Warren retired, Nixon was able to appoint his successor, as well as a number of other justices in an attempt to shift the Court further to the right. He only somewhat succeeded, as many of his own nominees joined in some relatively liberal decisions, including Roe v. Wade, declaring a Right to Abortion (written, in fact, by a Nixon nominee [Justice Blackmun] and decided by a 7-2 margin), as well as the case declaring that Nixon did not have executive privilege to do anything he so desired.
Despite the few liberal precedents of the Nixon era, SCOTUS became markedly more conservative, and with the election of Reagan as president and through to the Obama administration, the Court has become consistently more conservative.
* The Court has always had liberal and conservative factions, but the current Court's conservative and liberal factions are more conservative than in the past. I plan to devote an entire blog post to this issue in the future, so I don't plan to go too deep into this now, but what I mean is this:
* The Conservative faction is made up of 4 Ultra-Conservatives and one moderate (but still quite conservative) swing-vote justice. The Liberal faction is made up of liberal justices, but the liberal justices of today are far more moderate than in, for example, the Warren Era. The retirements/deaths of the remaining "Strong" liberals in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who were replaced by moderate liberals, and the rise of moderate Justice Stevens as the foremost liberal on the Court has helped to buttress this shift in the Court.
As I said, I will soon devote a post to the shifts in the Court during the modern era as well as a compare-contrast between the concepts of liberal and conservative in the Warren Era v. the Roberts Era, so I will end here for now. Thanx for reading!
UPDATE: See Here for the SCOTUS Compare-Contrast Post!
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