In Part 6 of our series on the New Deal, Judge Stephen Sfekas examines the dramatic shift at the Supreme Court that transformed American constitutional law in 1937. In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, the Court upheld Washington State’s minimum wage law, signaling the end of the Lochner era and a new willingness to defer to legislatures on economic regulation. Just two weeks later, the Court handed down a series of decisions upholding the National Labor Relations Act, led by the landmark NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., and greatly expanded the federal government’s power to regulate economic activity affecting interstate commerce.

The episode explores Justice Owen Roberts and the famous “switch in time that saved nine,” the carefully constructed legal strategy behind the Wagner Act cases, and the Court’s subsequen ...