Harlan Fiske Stone was an American political figure, lawyer, and jurist. A native of New Hampshire, he served as the dean of Columbia Law School, his alma mater, in the early 20th century. As a member of the Republican Party, he was appointed as the 52nd Attorney General of the United States before becoming an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1925.
Background
Stone was born on October 11, 1872, in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, the son of Frederick Lauson Stone and Anne Butler Stone. His father and most of his forebears were farmers. Early in life, Stone moved with his family to Mill Valley, Massachusetts.
Education
After receiving his early education in the local school, amply supplemented with work on his family’s farm, Stone enrolled in the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1888, where he played quarterback on the football team for two seasons. But he was expelled in his sophomore year for his part in a brawl between freshmen and upperclassmen, in which Stone accidentally assaulted one of the college instructors. He moved in 1890 to Amherst College, where he played football again and from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1894. After graduation, Stone taught high school and coached football for a time in Newbury port, Massachusetts, before deciding to enroll in Columbia Law School in 1895. He graduated in 1898.
Career
He gained admittance to the New York bar, and worked as a law clerk for a year on Wall Street with the prestigious firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. At the same time, he accepted a position as instructor with the Columbia Law School. In fall 1899 he began an association with the Wilmer Canfield firm, which gave him an office from which to practice part-time. Over the following six years, Stone juggled teaching responsibilities, a part-time legal practice, and his own scholarly efforts. Years later, when he became a justice on die Supreme Court, lawyers would mine the articles he wrote in these early years for citations in support of their arguments before him. “In younger and more innocent days,” Stone later told the American Bar Association, “with no premonition of the future, I took the time from busy days at the bar to write occasional articles in the law journals of scientific and technical interest, only to experience, in a repentant old age, the unhappy fate of hearing them, on occasion, cited to me in court in support of both sides of the same question.”
In 1905 Stone left Columbia to practice law full-time and accepted a partnership in the firm, now renamed Wilmer, Canfield 8c Stone. But Columbia Law School was finally able to tempt him back to legal academia in 1910, this time as professor of law and dean of the law school. For the next 13 years, Stone remained at Columbia, but the lure of a lucrative legal practice eventually prompted him to resign as dean in February 1923 and, after a summer’s vacation in Europe, to accept a partnership in Sullivan and Cromwell, where he headed the firm’s litigation section. No sooner had he made this transition, however, than President Calvin Coolidge persuaded him to accept the post of U.S. attorney general in the spring of 1924.
Shortly after Coolidge’s reelection in 1924, Justice Joseph McKenna announced his retirement from the Court and the president promptly tendered Harlan Fiske Stone’s name as McKenna’s replacement. Initially there were minor objections to Stone’s appointment, arising from claims that his days as a Wall Street attorney would make him unduly attentive to corporate America on the bench. After making an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee—the first of its kind by an appointee to the Court—Stone received confirmation from the Senate on February 5, 1924, by a vote of 71-6.
Chief Justice Stone’s career on the Court ended abruptly. On April 22, 1946, after announcing a dissent in one of die cases before the Court, the chief justice was suddenly incapacitated on the bench and had to be removed to his home. He died that evening of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
Politics
Once on the Court, Justice Stone soon parted company with a fellow Republican, Chief Justice William Howard Taft. Stone brought to his role as a Supreme Court justice a commitment to judicial restraint, and this restraint soon collided with the views of Taft and the Court’s other conservatives, who were happy to exercise their judicial power in service of a laissez-faire approach to the Constitution. Majorities of the Court repeatedly invalidated federal and state laws regulating economic affairs —found himself dissenting in the company of the Court’s more liberal justices, Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and later Benjamin Cardozo. Taft retired at the beginning of 1930, to be replaced by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, but the divide between the Court’s core conservatives—Justices Van Devanter, Sutherland, McReynolds, and Butler, called the Four Horsemen—and a trio of justices—including Stone, Brandeis, and soon Cardozo—continued to fracture the Court.
Only after President Roosevelt threatened to pack the Court with additional justices more amenable to his legislative programs did Hughes and Roberts decisively break from the Four Horsemen and create a consistent new majority that upheld New Deal legislation. By 1937, when this new majority announced itself in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), Stone’s principle of judicial restraint had triumphed on the Court.
After the decision in West Coast Hotel Co., the Court accorded a copious deference to economic legislation passed by federal and state governments. But it remained to be seen whether tins deference would extend to all constitutional questions. On this crucial issue, Stone was to have important influence. In United States v. Carotene Products (1938), a case of little general significance decided the year after the Court’s abrupt reorientation, Stone wrote the majority’s opinion practicing the new deference toward a law regulating the sale of “filled” milk, that is, skim milk with vegetable oils added to substitute for butterfat. In perhaps the most famous footnote of American constitutional law, however—footnote four Justice Stone considered whether such deference was inevitably required in all constitutional cases. He suggested that deference might not be appropriate in cases involving legislation that “restricts those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation” or that represents “prejudice against discrete and insular minorities.” In the years after Stone penned these words, they would be quoted innumerable times by courts, lawyers, and legal scholars. Footnote four thus became a kind of blueprint for constitutional development over the next half century. Following the course established in 1937, the Court generally abandoned any vigorous review of federal and state attempts to regulate the economy. It broadly interpreted Congress’s power to pass legislation regulating interstate commerce and generally rejected claims that economic regulations violated contract or property rights. Beginning around the same time, however, the Court became a more vigorous protector of specific liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, such as freedom of speech. Eventually the Court took a far more active role in scrutinizing laws that distorted the voting process. Finally, in keeping with Stone’s concern for laws diat reflected prejudice against discrete and insular minorities, the Court breathed new life into the antidiscrimination norms inherent in the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
Membership
Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences. Member American Law Institute, American Bar. Association (council legal education), New York State Bar Association, Association Bar of City of New York, International Academy Comparative Law, Society of Comparative Legislation (London), American Philosophical Society, American Judicature Society, Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Delta Phi, Phi Delta Phi.
Member Society of Public Teachers of Law (Great Britain). Clubs: Century, Lawyers, University (New York).
Connections
In 1899 Stone also married a childhood playmate from Chesterfield: Agnes Harvey, with whom he had two sons, Marshall and Lauson.