Justice Robert H. Jackson
Today’s Justice of the Day is: ROBERT H. JACKSON. Justice Jackson was born on this day, February 13, in 1892.
Justice Jackson was born in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania. He attended Albany Law School in New York, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, though he did not graduate and was the last Justice appointed to not do so.
Justice Jackson worked in private practice in Jamestown (from 1913 to 1917, and 1918 to 1934) and Buffalo, New York (from 1917 to 1918); during this time he was also Corporation Counsel for Jamestown (from 1918 to 1934). He became General Counsel to the Bureau of Internal Revenue at the United States Department of the Treasury the year he ceased working as a private attorney, and remained there until 1935, when he started a three year stint as Special Counsel to both the Treasury and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission; concurrently, he also served as Assistant Attorney General of the Tax Division of the United States Department of Justice (from 1936 to 1938). In 1938, Justice Jackson became Solicitor General of the United States, before leaving that office the following year. He began serving as Attorney General of the United States in 1940, and remained there until his appointment to the SCUS.
Justice Jackson was nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 12, 1941, to a seat vacated by Justice Harlan Fiske Stone (who had been appointed Chief Justice of the United States). He was confirmed by the United States Senate on July 7, and received his commission on July 11, the same day he took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS. Justice Jackson served on the Stone, Vinson, and Warren Courts, and his service was terminated on October 9, 1954, due to his death.
Justice Jackson’s judicial ideology tended to more closely align with the judicial restraint of Justice Felix Frankfurter than the inventive liberalism of Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, though he did resist joining the opinion of the Court in the infamous Korematsu v. United States (1944) case, wherein a majority of the SCUS (including, ironically, the aforementioned Justices Black and Douglas) held that the government’s supposed need to prevent espionage and sabotage overrode the civil rights of Japanese Americans. He is perhaps most famous for having joined Chief Justice Earl Warren’s unanimous opinion of the Court in Brown v. Board of Education (I) (1954), which saw the SCUS declare racial segregation in public schooling unconstitutional. Due to his failing health, virtually all of Justice Jackson’s conversations about Brown had to be conducted in a hospital room, and it was there that (according to some sources) Chief Justice Warren persuaded him to both reverse his early inclination to vote against Brown and drop the concurring opinion he had wanted to file (Chief Justice Warren apparently felt that having any published opinions other than his own could shatter the sense of unanimity he wanted the Justices to convey, which he feared would in turn inspire massive Southern resistance). He later made a point of coming in to the Court on the day Brown was handed down, perhaps fearing that his absence would be misconstrued as signifying disagreement.