It was this problem that provoked Franklin Roosevelt’s 1937 “court packing” plan. Not only had Roosevelt just been overwhelmingly reelected with 61 percent of the popular vote, but he faced an unprecedented challenge in the Great Depression, which had prompted a reconsideration of the role of government in the economy. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, which reflected this new thinking, was initially thwarted by a conservative Supreme Court majority composed of justices who were over seventy years old and had done their legal training in the nineteenth century.
