Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States is the unanimous 1935 Supreme Court decision that struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, the centerpiece of Franklin Roosevelt’s early New Deal. The Court held that Congress had handed the president lawmaking power it could not give away, and that federal authority under the Commerce Clause did not reach a Brooklyn slaughterhouse selling chickens to local butchers. The ruling came down on May 27, 1935, and picked up the nickname “the sick chicken case” from one of the underlying charges.
Who the Schechters Were
The Schechters were four brothers, Jewish immigrants who ran kosher poultry slaughterhouses in Brooklyn. They bought live chickens shipped in from other states, slaughtered them, and sold them to local retailers and butchers. The business was small. Every sale happened inside New York, but the supply that fed it crossed state lines.
Federal prosecutors brought a 60-count indictment charging the Schechter Poultry Corporation with violating the “Live Poultry Code,” one of more than 500 codes of fair competition adopted across American industry by early 1934 under the National Industrial Recovery Act. After the trial court dismissed some counts and the jury acquitted on others, the brothers were convicted on 18 counts plus conspiracy.
The violations show how granular the codes were. The Schechters were charged with paying below the code’s minimum wage and working employees beyond its maximum hours. They were charged with selling an unfit chicken, the count that gave the case its name. And they were charged with breaking the “straight killing” rule: customers were supposed to buy chickens by the coop or half-coop, not reach in and pick out individual birds. The Schechters had let buyers choose.
How the NIRA Worked
Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933. The law let the president approve “codes of fair competition” for individual industries, setting rules on wages, hours, prices, and trade practices. Trade groups usually drafted the codes themselves, and once the president signed off they carried the force of law, with criminal penalties for violations. The theory was that if whole industries stopped undercutting one another, the downward spiral of the Depression might end.
The Two Constitutional Questions
The government defended the prosecution on the Commerce Clause, arguing that a national emergency justified broad federal authority and that local transactions like the Schechters’ still affected the larger flow of interstate commerce.
The Schechters answered on two fronts. Their business was purely local: the chickens may have arrived from out of state, but every sale and every alleged violation happened inside Brooklyn. And the NIRA itself was structurally flawed, because the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to make laws. By letting the president approve whatever codes industry groups put in front of him without meaningful standards, Congress had let the executive branch write laws.
What the Court Held
The Court ruled 9-0 against the government. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote the majority opinion and accepted both of the Schechters’ arguments.
On delegation, Hughes found that the NIRA gave the president power “without precedent.” Congress had set no standards for evaluating which codes to approve, had not defined what “fair competition” meant, had required no administrative procedures, and had provided for no judicial review. The president could approve virtually any code an industry group proposed. That, Hughes concluded, was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive branch.
On the Commerce Clause, Hughes drew a line between “direct” and “indirect” effects on interstate commerce. The poultry had traveled across state lines to reach New York, but once it arrived at the Schechters’ slaughterhouse the interstate journey ended. The chickens had come to a “permanent rest” within the state. Wages paid to workers, sales to local retailers, and the choice of individual birds were local activities with only an indirect connection to interstate commerce. Erasing that distinction, Hughes warned, would leave “virtually no limit to the federal power” and create “a completely centralized government.”
Cardozo’s Concurrence
Justice Benjamin Cardozo wrote separately to press the delegation point harder. Cardozo had dissented in Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, an earlier case that struck down a different section of the NIRA on delegation grounds, and he thought that ruling had gone too far. Schechter was different. He called the NIRA’s grant of authority “unconfined and vagrant,” a “roving commission to inquire into evils and, upon discovery, correct them.” Even a justice skeptical of aggressive nondelegation rulings saw this statute as crossing every line.
What Happened Next
The decision infuriated Roosevelt. Days later he told reporters the Court had “relegated” the country to a “horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce,” complaining that the Commerce Clause was being read as if it were still 1787. Schechter was not the only blow the Court dealt to New Deal legislation, and by February 1937 Roosevelt had proposed expanding the Supreme Court’s membership so he could appoint additional justices. Critics called it court-packing. The plan failed in Congress, though the political pressure it generated may have contributed to a shift in the Court’s approach.
The direct/indirect distinction did not last. In 1937, in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., Hughes wrote for the majority again and adopted a more flexible test: Congress could reach intrastate activity that had a “close and substantial relation to interstate commerce” where controlling it was “essential or appropriate” to protect that commerce. Labor disputes at a major steel manufacturer, the Court concluded, met that standard. Justice McReynolds, in dissent, accused the majority of abandoning Schechter.
Why the Case Still Matters
Schechter’s Commerce Clause holding was effectively displaced within two years. Its nondelegation holding was not. It remains one of the last times the Supreme Court struck down a federal statute purely because Congress gave away too much of its lawmaking power without adequate guidelines.
That half of the case has re-entered the conversation. Several current justices have signaled interest in reviving stricter limits on how much authority Congress can hand to federal agencies. The Court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA, grounded in what it calls the “major questions doctrine,” reflects a related skepticism: when an agency claims authority to make decisions of vast economic or political significance, the Court now demands clear congressional authorization. The Schechter brothers probably were not thinking about constitutional structure when they let customers pick their own chickens. Their case set down two principles anyway. Congress cannot hand the president a blank check to make law, and federal power has some limit where local activity begins. The first is still live doctrine. The second has been redrawn many times, and the tension it named has not gone away.