Abraham "Abe" Fortas was a U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice from 1965 to 1969. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, Fortas became a law professor at Yale University, and then an advisor for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Fortas worked at the Department of the Interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and during that time President Harry S. Truman appointed him to delegations that helped set up the United Nations in 1945.
Background
Abe Fortas was born on June 19, 1910, in Memphis, Tennessee, the last of five children born to William Fortas and Ray Berson Fortas. Fortas’s parents were Jews who had immigrated to the United States from England. His father earned a living chiefly as a cabinetmaker, and from him Abe inherited a deep love for music.
Education
Abe became a talented violin player and formed a jazz band called the Blue Melody Boys Band while in high school. He was even more precocious as a student than he was as a musician. He graduated second in his class from South Side High School when he was 15 years old.
In fall 1926 Fortas was able to enter South-western College in Memphis on a scholarship. Four years later he graduated first in his class and set out to pursue a legal career by winning admission to Yale Law School. There he demonstrated his academic ability at one of the most prestigious law schools of the nation by serving as the editor of the Tale Law Journal and graduating second in his class in June 1933.
Career
Fortas remained at Yale for four years after graduation as an assistant professor under William O. Douglas and also served as consultant to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In 1937 he left Yale fora full-time appointment at the SEC, and from 1939 to 1941 served as general counsel to the Public Works Administration (PWA). In 1941 he entered the Department of the Interior and became its undersecretary one year later. He was adviser to the U.S. delegation to the organizational meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and to the first U.N. General Assembly session in London in 1946. Later that year, he resigned from government service in order to establish the private law firm of
Arnold, Fortas, and Porter in Washington, D.C., which soon became one of the most successful and prestigious firms in the city.
Fortas was both a noted corporate counsel and a civil libertarian, defending victims of Senator Joseph McCarthy such as Owen Lattimore. In 1963 he successfully argued the case of Gideon v. Wainwright before the Supreme Court, winning a landmark decision which gave poor criminal defendants the right to free legal counsel.
In 1948 Fortas represented Lyndon B. Johnson against a challenge to the latter’s senatorial nomination and subsequently became his close friend and adviser. In 1965, as president, Johnson chose Fortas as his first appointee to the Supreme Court. For the next four years, Fortas, allied with Justice William O. Douglas, his former professor, sided with the court’s liberal majority in numerous decisions against censorship, racial discrimination, restrictions on the rights of political dissenters, and violations of church-state separation.
When Johnson nominated Fortas to succeed retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren in 1968, a strong conservative coalition of Republican and Southern Democrat opponents, as well as charges of “cronyism” and the improper acceptance of fees, led to a filibuster in the Senate. As a result, his name was withdrawn and Fortas became the first nominee to the post of Chief Justice since 1795 to fail to receive Senate approval.
A year later, the revelation in Life magazine that Fortas had agreed to accept an annual fee from the family foundation of Louis E. Wolfson, who was subsequently convicted of securities violations, raised a storm of public protest and the possibility of impeachment. Consequently Fortas resigned from the court, the first justice ever to do so under the pressure of public criticism.
Following his resignation, Fortas practiced law in Washington, D.C., until his death.
Politics
Fortas immediately allied himself with the Court’s liberal wing, thus allowing Chief Justice Earl Warren to continue a revolutionary expansion in the area of individual rights. Fortas secured a lasting place in constitutional history by writing some of this period’s most famous cases. In re Gault (1967) extended to juvenile criminal proceedings many of die constitutional protections available to adult criminal defendants and made applicable to state proceedings by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) protected the right of students to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to school. And Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), held that the First Amendment’s establishment
clause prevented states from barring the teaching of evolution in schools.
A little less than three years after Abe Fortas joined the Supreme Court, Earl Warren announced his intention of resigning as chief justice. On June 26, 1968, President Johnson nominated Fortas to replace Warren. Johnson’s attempt to advance his friend, though, proved to be Fortas’s undoing. In the confirmation hearing that followed, opponents of the nomination used the occasion to rail against Warren court activism and against Fortas’s continuing close relationship with a sitting president. Soon it was discovered that Fortas’s former law partner, Paul Porter, had raised $15,000—more than a third of the amount of Fortas’s annual $39,500 salary as an associate justice—to pay Fortas to teach a seminar on law at American University Law School. In the face of a filibuster in the Senate, Johnson withdrew Fortas’s nomination on October 4, 1968. But this was not the end of the matter. Seven months later, Life magazine published an article revealing that Fortas had accepted $20,000 from the Wolfson Family Foundation for legal advice and direction in the foundation’s planning at a time when Louis Wolfson was under investigation for allegedly manipulating the stock market. The revelation prompted calls for Fortas’s impeachment and led the justice to tender his lesignation from the Court on May 14, 1969. When his former law firm refused to welcome him back, Fortas set up a practice in Washington, D.C. with another lawyer. He remained mostly out of public view until he appeared before the Supreme Court to argue a case on behalf of Puerto Rico in 1982.
Membership
Member Federal, American, Federal Communication Commission bar associations, Order of Coif, Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Kappa.
Connections
On July 9, 1935, he married Carolyn Eugenia Agger, an economist who had worked at the Department of Agriculture while he was there and whom he persuaded to attend law school at his own alma mater. The couple never had children.