Robert H. Jackson

Robert Houghwout Jackson was born February 13, 1892, in Spring Creek Township, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Frewsburg, New York, the son of a farmer turned innkeeper. He attended Albany Law School for one year, decided the second added little, and instead spent it reading law as an apprentice in a Jamestown firm, still enough to pass the bar in 1913. He built a private practice in western New York for two decades, representing local businesses and occasionally opposing power companies, before Franklin Roosevelt's administration pulled him to Washington in 1934. He argued tax and antitrust cases for the Treasury and Justice Departments, and by 1938 held the title of Solicitor General, the government's top courtroom lawyer, having never completed a second year of law school.

Jackson became Attorney General in January 1940 and, eighteen months later, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, the only person in American history to hold both offices along with Solicitor General. His opinions defended civil liberties against wartime pressure: his 1943 majority in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette struck down mandatory flag salutes in public schools, and his Korematsu v. United States dissent rejected the internment of Japanese Americans the majority upheld. In 1945 he took a leave from the bench to become chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, co-drafting the charter that created the tribunal and delivering its opening and closing arguments against the surviving Nazi leadership. His 1952 concurrence in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, limiting a president's wartime seizure powers, remains the framework courts use to judge presidential authority.

The Chief Justice seat he expected never came. Franklin Roosevelt had all but promised it to him, but Roosevelt died, and Harry Truman gave the job to Fred Vinson in 1946 while Jackson was still in Germany prosecuting Nazis. Jackson blamed fellow Justice Hugo Black, convinced Black had threatened to resign and split the Court unless passed over, and cabled the news from Nuremberg to Congress, accusing a sitting colleague of manipulating the appointment for personal advantage -- the only time in the Court's history one Justice has leveled that kind of public charge at another. He called it later a "disgraceful brawl" and never fully recanted it. He kept working through two heart attacks in 1954, the second fatal, insisting a Justice's job was to sit for as long as he could.

Jackson died October 9, 1954, at 62, and all eight of his colleagues attended the funeral in Jamestown. The Black feud faded from memory faster than the opinions did: Barnette is still taught as the Court's clearest statement on compelled speech, the Youngstown concurrence is cited in nearly every modern separation-of-powers case, and Justice Antonin Scalia later called him the finest legal stylist the twentieth-century Court produced. Nuremberg outlasted the domestic law. The charter Jackson helped draft became the template for international war-crimes tribunals, from the 1990s Yugoslavia and Rwanda courts to the permanent International Criminal Court, so the trial he ran is remembered less for its verdicts than for having happened by law rather than by firing squad.

Robert H. Jackson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette case
  Majority opinion striking down mandatory flag salutes in public schools 1943
• Korematsu v. United States dissent case
  Rejected the internment of Japanese Americans the majority upheld 1944
• London Charter of the International Military Tribunal law
  Co-drafted the charter that created the Nuremberg tribunal 1945
• Nuremberg opening statement speech
  Delivered November 21, 1945, opening the trial of the surviving Nazi leadership 1945
• Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer concurrence case
  Three-tier test for presidential power still cited by courts today 1952

• February 13, 1892 aged 0 Born in Spring Creek Township, Pennsylvania
• 1913 aged ~21 Admitted to the bar after reading law rather than finishing law school
• 1938 aged ~46 Appointed United States Solicitor General Argued 44 cases before the Supreme Court, losing only 6.
• January 4, 1940 aged 47 Becomes United States Attorney General
• July 11, 1941 aged 49 Sworn in as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
• November 21, 1945 aged 53 Delivers the Nuremberg opening statement as chief U.S. prosecutor
• June 10, 1946 aged 54 Cables Congress publicly accusing Justice Hugo Black of manipulating the Chief Justice appointment
• March 30, 1954 aged 62 Suffers the first of two heart attacks Hospitalized until May 17, then returned to announce the Brown v. Board decision.
• October 9, 1954 aged 62 Dies of a second heart attack at 62

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. appointed
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. sent to Nuremberg by
• Hugo Black 1886–1971
  Justice who championed strong First Amendment protections and incorporation of the Bill of Rights. rival
• William O. Douglas 1898–1980
  Longest-serving Supreme Court justice, noted for expansive civil-liberties jurisprudence and environmental advocacy. rival
• Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965
  Supreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law. colleague