Answer:
The New Deal often encountered heavy criticism, and had many constitutional challenges.
Roosevelt was wary of the Supreme Court early in his first term, and his administration was slow to bring constitutional challenges of New Deal legislation before the court.[1] However, early wins for New Deal supporters came in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell[2] and Nebbia v. New York[3] at the start of 1934. At issue in each case were state laws relating to economic regulation. Blaisdell concerned the temporary suspension of creditor's remedies by Minnesota in order to combat mortgage foreclosures, finding that temporal relief did not, in fact, impair the obligation of a contract. Nebbia held that New York could implement price controls on milk, in accordance with the state's police power. While not tests of New Deal legislation themselves, the cases gave cause for relief of administration concerns about Associate Justice Owen Roberts, who voted with the majority in both cases.[4] Roberts's opinion for the court in Nebbia was also encouraging for the administration:[1]
[T]his court from the early days affirmed that the power to promote the general welfare is inherent in government.[5]
Nebbia also holds a particular significance: it was the one case in which the Court abandoned its jurisprudential distinction between the "public" and "private" spheres of economic activity, an essential distinction in the court's analysis of state police power.[6] The effect of this decision radiated outward, affecting other doctrinal methods of analysis in wage regulation, labor, and the power of the U.S. Congress to regulate commerce.[6][7]
Just three weeks after its defeat in the railroad pension case, the Roosevelt administration suffered its most severe setback, on May 27, 1935: "Black Monday".[8] Chief Justice Hughes arranged for the decisions announced from the bench that day to be read in order of increasing importance.[8] The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Roosevelt in three cases:[9]
With several cases laying forth the criteria necessary to respect the due process and property rights of individuals, and statements of what constituted an appropriate delegation of legislative powers to the President, Congress quickly revised the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA).[10] However, New Deal supporters still wondered how the AAA would fare against Chief Justice Hughes's restrictive view of the Commerce Clause from the Schechter decision.
On what became known as White Monday, on March 29, 1937, the court handed down three decisions upholding New Deal legislation, two of them unanimous: West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish,[11] Wright v. Vinton Branch,[12] and Virginia Railway v. Federation.[13][14] The Wright case upheld a new Frazier-Lemke Act which had been redrafted to meet the Court's objections in the Radford case; similarly, Virginia Railway case upheld labor regulations for the railroad industry, and is particularly notable for its foreshadowing of how the Wagner Act cases would be decided as the National Labor Relations Board was modeled on the Railway Labor Act contested in the case.[14]