Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States

For more information on Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, visit Britannica.com.

Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), unanimously held the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) unconstitutional. With the NIRA, one of the two pillars of the early New Deal, Congress authorized codes of fair competition, cartel-like agreements among industrywide trade groups that set prices, regulated wages, controlled production, and apportioned markets under presidential authority.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, writing for the Court, rejected arguments based on Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934) that the Great Depression authorized emergency measures: "Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power." Hughes held that the regulations involved in this case, the poultry code, involved local matters, not interstate commerce, relying on the direct and indirect impact distinction that supposedly apportioned the authority in the commerce clause and the Tenth Amendment. Finally, he wrote that Congress had excessively delegated its authority to the president and through him to private groups. "This is delegation running riot," wrote Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, concurring.

Although the NIRA was collapsing under its own flaws, President Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced the result as throwing industrial America back into "the horse and buggy age." Within two years, the Court abandoned the direct and indirect criterion for measuring the regulatory authority of Congress. Similarly, the delegation issue seemed aberrational until it was revived in arguments in Browner v. American Trucking Association (2001).

Bibliography

Cushman, Barry. Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.