On June 2, 1952, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, famously known as the Steel Seizure Case. This landmark case generated high political drama, sharp legal conflict, and tides of public opinion, with the U.S. Supreme Court facing issues of surpassing importance for a nation committed to the rule of law. The defining issue in the case—whether the president possesses an inherent or emergency power to seize control of an industry, such as the steel mills, in the midst of a crisis—compelled the Supreme Court to engage in the most penetrating examination of executive power in the country’s history.

The case originated in a threatened strike by steelworkers. President Harry S. Truman announced on April 8, 1952, the issue of Executive Order No. 10340, which directed Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize the steel industry to avert a nationwide strike that the president feared would jeopardize America’s war effort in Korea as well as other foreign policy and national security objectives. In the executive order, President Truman grounded the seizure order in the authority vested in him by “the Constitution and laws of the United States, and as President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the armed forces.” The steel companies immediately brought suit to seek a temporary restraining order. In federal court the next day, the assistant attorney general, Holmes Baldridge, asserted that the seizure was based upon the inherent executive powers of the president and not on any statute. The federal judge David A. Pine shocked the nation when he rejected President Truman’s assertions and ruled that the action was unconstitutional.

Judge Pine’s ruling that nothing in the Constitution supports the assertion of an undefined, unlimited inherent power in the presidency was affirmed by the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote. In the majority opinion written by Justice Hugo Black, the Court rejected the claim of such an inherent presidential power. Of the five concurring opinions accompanying Black’s opinion, Justice Robert H. Jackson’s became the most influential and, like the decision itself, came to cast a lengthy shadow over the development of American constitutional law.

Read the full text of the majority opinion

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For immediate download: Expert analysis of the case by David Gray Adler