Book Reviews

For more than two decades Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer' was regarded as sui generis or aberrant. Justice Black's holding that the seizure violated the separation of powers was so simplistic and the concurring opinions so diffuse that there seemed little possibility that Youngstown would become a landmark. In disgust, Edward Corwin subtitled an article on the seizure "A Judicial Brick Without Straw." Youngstown would be remembered, wrote Corwin, "as an outstanding example of the sic volo, sic jubeo frame of mind into which the Court is occasionally maneuvered by the public context of the case before it.". Glendon Schubert predicted that the majority's evasion of the question of the existence of a national emergency, coupled with its failure to recognize a real conflict among statutory policies, would confine the decision "to its very special facts." 3 Paul Freund, in a commentary that seems to have fixed the law professoriate's view of the case, even suggested that Youngstown never should have reached the Supreme Court and that the Court should not have decided the validity of the seizure in the posture in which the case did reach the Court.4