ional revolution" of 1937 produced numerous reversals of
earlier precedents on the ground of "error", some of them, the late Mr.
James M. Beck complained, without "the obsequious respect of a funeral
oration".[5] In 1944 Justice Reed cited fourteen cases decided between
March 27, 1937 and June 14, 1943 in which one or more prior
constitutional decisions were overturned.[6] On the same occasion
Justice Roberts expressed the opinion that adjudications of the Court
were rapidly gravitating "into the same class as a restricted railroad
ticket, good for this day and train only".[7]

Years ago the eminent historian of the Supreme Court, Mr. Charles
Warren, had written:

However the Court may interpret the provisions of the
Constitution, it is still the Constitution which is the law
and not the decision of the Court.[8]

In short, it is "not necessarily so" that the Constitution is preserved
in the Court's reading of it.

A third difficulty in the way of the theory that Judicial Review is
preservative of the Constitution is confronted when we turn to consider
the statistical aspects of the matter. The suggestion that the
Constitution of the United States contained in embryo from the beginning
the entirety of our national Constitutional Law confronts the will to
believe with an altogether impossible test. Compared with the
Constitutional Document, with its 7,000 words more or less, the bulk of
material requiring to be noticed in the preparation of an annotation of
this kind is simply immense. First and last, the Court has probably
decided well over 4,000 cases involving questions of constitutional
interpretation. In many instances, to be sure, the constitutional issue
was disposed of quite briefly. In some instances, on the other hand, the
published report of the case runs to more than 200 pages.[9] In the
total, it is probable that at least 50,000 pages of the United States
Supreme Court Reports are devoted to Constitutional Law topics.

Nor is this the whole story, or indeed the most important part of it.
Even more striking is the fact that the vast proportion of cases forming
the corpus of national Constitutional Law has stemmed, or has purported
to stem, from four or five brief phrases of the Constitutional Document,
the power "to regulate ... commerce among the States," impairment of
"the obligation of contracts" (now practically dried up as a formal
source of constitutional law), deprivation of "libert