to teach classes pertaining to many aspects of the law. From 1930 to 1935, Rutledge served as dean of the law school; he then spent four years as dean of the University of Iowa College of Law. During his time in academia, Rutledge did not function primarily as a scholar: for instance, he only published two articles in law reviews. Yet his students and colleagues thought highly of him as a teacher, and the legal scholar William Wiecek noted that he was recalled as "dedicated and demanding" by those whom he taught. Rutledge frequently weighed in on questions of public importance, supporting academic freedom and free speech at Washington University and opposing the Supreme Court's approach to child labor laws. His tenure as dean overlapped with the New Deal-period clash between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Supreme Court whose decisions thwarted his agenda. Rutledge came down firmly on Roosevelt's side: he denounced the Court's rulings striking down portions of the New Deal and voiced support for the President's unsuccessful "court-packing plan", which attempted to make the Court more amenable to Roosevelt's agenda by increasing the number of justices. In Rutledge's view, the justices of his era had "imposed their own political philosophy" rather than the law in their decisions; as such, he felt that expanding the Court was a regrettable but necessary way for Congress to bring it back into line. Roosevelt's proposal was extremely unpopular in the Midwest, and Rutledge's support for it was loudly denounced: his position even led some members of the Iowa legislature to threaten to freeze faculty salaries. Still, Roosevelt noticed Rutledge's outspoken support for him, and it garnered the dean prominence on the national stage. In the words of Rutledge himself, "[t]he Court bill gave me my chance". Court of Appeals (1939–1943) Having attracted the attention of Roosevelt, Rutledge was seriously considered as a potential Supreme Court nominee when a vacancy arose in 1939. Although the President ultimately appointed Felix Frankfurter to that seat, he decided that it would be politically advantageous to appoint someone from west of the Mississippi—such as Rutledge—to fill the next opening. Roosevelt selected William O. Douglas, who had lived in the states of Minnesota and Washington, instead of Rutledge when that vacancy arose, but he simultaneously offered Rutledge a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia—one of the nation's most influential appellate