>> charles evans hughes. i will say something about him in a second but the only -- the other thing to know about the court did not use the term at the time but it was a very activist core. it was overturning federal law 10 times the previous rate it was the courts on a mission and the conservative justices did see it as a mission or a holy war against communism and anarchy which they saw in the new deal. >> what was the rationale for the legal reason that all of these new deal laws were in the constitution? >> there were those from the contracts clause and the substantive process and all of the things that are used to strike down the programs. many old doctrines' were revised but fundamentally the notion of constitutionality was through to the 19th century with the low was a fair and of the sense of constitutionality implies a limited government, states' rights in a constitution of limitations. it was not as roosevelt felt, a broad avenue through which a lot of things could pass. sometimes as one of the just

different justices and judges that you quote in here, and i'll just quickly go over them: charles evans hughes, william brennan, earl warren, benjamin cardozo, felix frankfurter, antonin scalia, oliver wendell holmes jr., j. skelly wright, david bazelon and then a lot of other folks. but of all of those it seemed that i saw benjamin cardozo the most and he's the common law man. why? >> guest: because law is actually no different now than it was in roman times. law, the complex relationship between guidelines and flexibility, is something that human beings have been struggling with for as long as there's been civilization. these issues have all been thought about before. benjamin cardozo, at the end of a period beginning at the turn of the century, when people said, "we thought we could turn law into a science," had a series of lectures at yale that were brilliant. i mean, i encourage everybody to read them. one's called "the nature of the judicial process," where he says, basically, law can't be like a perfect letter-writing guide. you can't create the certainty that isn't available elsewhere