Robert H. Jackson, a life in the law
Robert H. Jackson, born this week (Feb. 13) in 1889, is the only American in history to have served as U.S. Solicitor General, U.S. Attorney General, and Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Not bad for a guy who never graduated from law school, and today he is considered among the most gifted writers to serve on the nation’s highest court.
He was especially protective of free speech, and his first major case in which he wrote the majority opinion was West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette (1943), in which, by a 6 – 3 majority, the court ruled that the First Amendment’s free speech language protected students from having to salute the American flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The suit was brought by a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who argued that their religion forbade them from pledging fealty to symbols. In his opinion Jackson famously wrote, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Jackson also famously dissented in Korematsu v United States (1944), in which, in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the court upheld President Roosevelt’s infamous Executive Order 9066, which forced innocent Japanese-americans into internment camps under suspicion of aiding the enemy. In his dissent Jackson warned that neither the president nor the War Department had the constitutional authority to deprive individuals of their rights simply because of a possible wartime threat to national security. The government has no right “to destroy the Constitution to approve all that the military may deem expedient,” Jackson wrote, adding that if the court allows this, “we may as well say that any military order will be constitutional, and have done with it.” And then, in 1945, Jackson temporarily left the Supreme Court to serve as the chief U.S. counsel at the trial in Nuremberg, Germany, of high-ranking Nazi party members and military officers accused of war crimes. In his opening remarks, Jackson eloquently and famously began, “The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs with which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
When Jackson died of a heart attack in 1954, he was buried in his boyhood hometown of Freeburg, N.Y., under a headstone that reads, “He kept the ancient landmarks and built the new.”
Bruce G. Kauffmann Email author Bruce G. Kauffmann at bruce@history lessons.net.