The Switch in Time That Saved Nine - Conventional Account

Conventional Account

Through the 1935-36 terms, Roberts had been the deciding vote in several 5-4 decisions invalidating New Deal legislation, casting his vote with the "conservative" bloc of the bench, the so-called "Four Horsemen". This "conservative" wing of the bench is viewed to have been in opposition to the "liberal Three Musketeers". Justice Roberts and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the remaining two justices, were the center swing votes.

The "switch" came in the case West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, when the Court announced its opinion in March 1937. Roberts joined Chief Justice Hughes, and Justices Louis Brandeis, Benjamin N. Cardozo, and Harlan Fiske Stone in upholding a Washington State minimum wage law. The decision was handed down less than two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his court-reform bill. Conventional history has painted Roberts's vote as a strategic, politically motivated shift to defeat Roosevelt's proposed legislation, but the historical record lends weight to assertions that Roberts's decision happened much earlier.

The ruling also marked the end of the Lochner era, a forty year period in which the Supreme Court struck down legislation that regulated businesses.