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61 Yale L. J. 818 (1952)
Leadership and Conflict in the Pricing of Gasoline

handle is hein.journals/ylr61 and id is 827 raw text is: 19521  HARLAN FISKE STONE AND FDR's COURT PLAN                     817
some years ?16 There were regrets, too, that the Justices should have become
so deeply mired in politics. What the Court needs just now is a period of
quiet and obscurity but I am afraid we will get neither, he wrote his friend
Backus.'6 Yet the receding political storm had left a subdued bench as a
causeway to social advance, and not a few observers felt that Stone had
played a significant role in achieving it. Through all these momentous
days he had been, as Charles A. Beard said, June 5, 1937, our pillar of fire
in a murky night. Seldom in all history, Beard's letter continues, has a
retribution, such as you forecast in your AAA opinion, come so swiftly
upon men who have refused to recognize the first, primordial principle in
government, that all human power has its limitations. Wise is the statesman,
whether political or judicial, who can plot in advance the curve of those
limitations.
The faith he had voiced in 1936 had now been vindicated. Judges could
revise their habits of mind. Without change in personnel, the Court had made
the Constitution function as a workable charter of government. But would
the recent gains hold? Stone was not sure. Let us hope, he commented as
the term ended, that when we get back to work next fall, the Court
question will have subsided, and that the reformation that seems to have
been accomplished proves to be a permanent one.105
163. HFS to Feli: Frankfurter, May 28, 1937.
164. HFS to G. H. Backus, October 13, 1937.
165. HFS to Felix Frankfurter, June 5, 1937.

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