Four Horsemen (Supreme Court)

The "Four Horsemen" was the nickname given by the press to four conservative members of the United States Supreme Court during the 1932–1937 terms, who opposed the New Deal agenda of President Franklin Roosevelt. They were Justices Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter. They were opposed by the liberal "Three Musketeers"—Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Harlan Stone. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Justice Owen J. Roberts controlled the balance. Hughes was more inclined to join the liberals, but Roberts was often swayed to the side of the conservatives.

Though at first the Court had accepted some of the New Deal legislation over the objections of the four conservative justices, in the 1935 term, the Four Horsemen, together with Roberts and Hughes, voided the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 (United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936)), along with the Federal Farm Bankruptcy Act, the Railroad Act, and the Coal Mining Act. In Carter v. Carter Coal Company, 298 U.S. 238 (1936), the Four together with Roberts voided legislation regulating the coal industry; the same line-up voided a New York minimum wage law for women and children in Morehead v. New York, 298 U.S. 587 (1936). The Court had also struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States 295 U.S. 495 (1935) the previous May. Though the latter decision was unanimous, Cardozo did not join the opinion for the Court (written by Chief Justice Hughes, and joined by Brandeis, Roberts, and the Four Horsemen), and wrote a separate concurrence, joined by Stone, to state the view of why the delegated power of legislation in the code at issue was "not canalized within banks that keep it from overflowing."

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