Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2020
Abstract
On September 5, 1917, at the height of American participation in the Great War, Charles Evans Hughes famously argued that “the power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.” This moment and those words were a collision between the onset of “total war,” Lochner-era jurisprudence, and cautious Progressive-era administrative development. This article tells the story of Hughes’s statement – including what he meant at the time and how he wrestled with some difficult questions that flowed from it. The article then concludes with some reasons why the story remains important today.
Recommended Citation
Matthew C. Waxman,
Constitutional War Powers in World War I: Charles Evans Hughes and the Power to Wage War Successfully,
Journal of Supreme Court History, Vol. 44, p. 267, 2019; Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 14-662
(2020).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2670
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Military, War, and Peace Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons