FDR’s court-packing threat made the Supreme Court yield on social policy

Evidence

F.D. Roosevelt’s struggle against the Supreme Court in the thirties in an attempt to extend social protection is another famous example. Roosevelt tried to undermine the Supreme Court and, in the language of our model, to increase executive insulation in a variety of ways. His struggle was partially successful, given that the Court felt threatened and started be more malleable of social policies. — Philippe Aghion, Alberto Alesina, and Francesco Trebbi, Endogenous Political Institutions, 188

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘switch in time that saved nine’ is a clean, tweetable bit of political trivia.
• XREF: Ties to institutional economics work on executive insulation and to accounts in A Midwife’s Tale of how distant legal institutions shaped ordinary lives.