[1] This was a unanimous decision that rendered parts of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA), a main component of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, unconstitutional.

There was laughter during oral arguments when Justice George Sutherland asked, "Well suppose however that all the chickens have gone over to one end of the coop?

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote for a unanimous Court in invalidating the industrial "codes of fair competition", which the NIRA enabled the President to issue.

Although many considered the NIRA a "dead statute" at this point in the New Deal scheme, the Court used its invalidation as an opportunity to affirm constitutional limits on congressional power, for fear that it could otherwise reach virtually anything that could be said to affect interstate commerce and intrude on many areas of legitimate state power.

Currie added that "it can hardly have escaped the Justices that apart from its limitation to business there was little to distinguish what Congress had attempted from the 1933 legislation authorizing Adolf Hitler to govern Germany by decree ... the delegation decision in Schechter was a salutary reminder of the Framers' decision to vest legislative power in a representative assembly.

"[8] Justice Benjamin Cardozo's concurring opinion clarified that a spectrum approach to direct and indirect effects is preferable to a strict dichotomy.

[10] Later cases, such as United States v. Lopez (1995),[11] perhaps signal a growing inclination in the Court to once again affirm limits on its scope.