The switch in time that saved nine

"The switch in time that saved nine" is the name given to what was perceived as the sudden jurisprudential shift by Associate Justice Owen Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1937 case West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. Conventional historical accounts portrayed the Court's majority opinion as a strategic political move to protect the Court's integrity and independence from President Franklin Roosevelt's court-reform bill (also known as the "court-packing plan"), which would have expanded the size of the bench up to 15 justices, though it has been argued that these accounts have misconstrued the historical record.

The term itself is a reference to the aphorism "A stitch in time saves nine", meaning that preventive maintenance is preferable.

Through the 1935–36 terms, Roberts had been the deciding vote in several 5–4 decisions invalidating New Deal legislation, casting his vote with the "conservative" bloc of the bench, the so-called "Four Horsemen". This "conservative" wing of the bench is viewed to have been in opposition to the "liberal Three Musketeers". Justice Roberts and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, the remaining two justices, were the center swing votes.

The "switch" came in the case West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, when the Court announced its opinion in March 1937. Roberts joined Chief Justice Hughes, and Justices Louis Brandeis, Benjamin N. Cardozo, and Harlan Fiske Stone in upholding a Washington State minimum wage law. The decision was handed down less than two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced his court-reform bill. Conventional history has painted Roberts's vote as a strategic, politically motivated shift to defeat Roosevelt's proposed legislation, but the historical record also lends weight to assertions that Roberts's decision happened much earlier.

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