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Chief Justice William Howard Taft and the Concept of Federalism
Post, Robert
Post, Robert
Abstract
Always given to a stately form of self-deprecation, William Howard Taft would no doubt have been amused by the subject of this paper. For of all the Supreme Court Justices of his time, Taft was undoubtedly the most averse, for reasons of both affinity and conviction, to what modem Americans would recognize as the ideal of federalism. To appreciate exactly why this is so, however, will require us to disentangle at least four separate aspects of that ideal: federalism as a commitment to limited national legislative power; federalism as a commitment to the diversity of local cultures; federalism as a commitment to decentralized management; and federalism as a commitment to the diffusion of power. Although these four aspects of federalism are ordinarily fused together into a single generalized preference for state decisionmaking, they in fact rest on distinct rationales and lead to quite diverse jurisprudential outcomes. These differences can be made clear by an examination of Taft's unique judicial perspective, an examination that has some relevance to our own contemporary struggles with the constitutional implications of federalism.