Background

Harlan was born on October 11, 1872 in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, United States, the second son and second of the four children of Frederick Lauson Stone and Anne (Butler) Stone. His father, a farmer, was the eighth generation of direct descendants of Simon Stone, who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635; five generations lived in the little town of Chesterfield.

His mother was a former school teacher. Both his parents, like their English forebears, developed physical stamina and moral strength from tilling New Hampshire's rocky soil. Frederick Stone's activities expanded beyond farming to buying and selling real estate, auctioneering agricultural implements, and engaging in civic pursuits. He roamed about the countryside and fished in a stream by an old grist mill.

Education

In 1874, seeking greater educational opportunities for their children, Winthrop and Harlan, they moved to a farm in Mill Valley, near Amherst, Massachussets, where Lauson and Helen were born. He excelled at the district schools and became a voracious reader.

Although Stone distinguished himself in high school, he decided at the end of his sophomore year to enter Massachusetts Agricultural College in the fall of 1888. There he developed an interest in science and acquired the nickname "Doc. "

A twist of fate changed the course of his life when he was expelled for joining in a chapel rush, accidentally shaking the chaplain "until his teeth rattled. " After a period of profound discouragement, Stone entered Amherst College in 1890, with the help of his high school teacher, Edith Field. Specializing in science and philosophy, he blossomed under the inspiration of Edward Garman "who taught young men to stand on their own feet intellectually and to encompass in their thinking spiritual as well as moral values. "

Stone excelled at public speaking and won oratorical contests. Demonstrating qualities of leadership, he became class president, business manager of the college weekly, the Student, and a leader in the senate where he fought for reforms in student government. Classmates predicted he would "be the most famous man in '94. "

The superior court sessions at nearby Salem stirred an interest in the law, and he abandoned a successful teaching career and entered Columbia Law School in 1895.

Stone was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1900, and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Amherst in 1913. Yale awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1924. Columbia and Williams each awarded him the same honorary degree in 1925.

Career

After graduation, Stone taught science at Newburyport (Massachussets) High School. To defray expenses, he taught history at Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn. Dean William S. Keener's innovations, especially the case system, had turned Columbia into a hotbed of controversy. To his delight, Stone found a group of men engaged in teaching law as a science (notably Dean Keener, George W. Kirchwey, John Bassett Moore, and George F. Canfield).

After graduation in 1898, Stone combined law school teaching with a clerkship in the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. A year later he shifted to Wilmer and Canfield.

Because of policy differences with President Nicholas Murray Butler, an inadequate salary, and growing family responsibilities with the birth of two sons, Marshall Harvey and Lauson, Stone resigned his professorship in March 1905 for a full-time partnership at Wilmer and Canfield. A year later, the family moved to Englewood, New Jersey. Stone's impact at Columbia remained, and in 1906 he accepted Butler's invitation to return as professor and dean, with the understanding that he would enjoy freedom in choosing the law faculty.

Soon the authoritarian president and the staunchly independent dean clashed. Again, Stone resigned, evoking a concerted drive by students, faculty, and trustees on his behalf. The upshot was his unanimous appointment as dean, effective July 10, 1910. The years 1910-1916 were marked by assiduous efforts to raise academic standards and improve the curriculum.

Stone himself set an example by continuing to teach, write, and maintain a nominal law practice at Wilmer, Canfield, and Stone. As a practicing lawyer, Stone's career was brief - 1905-1910 and about six months in 1923-1924. In later years, he rated his teaching more enduring than anything he did as a judge.

An Anglophile and strong interventionist, Stone anxiously observed the course of World War I. He lamented his ineligibility for active service. A chance to serve his country came with his appointment to a special board of inquiry to examine cases of conscientious objectors. Passions were high, especially against those "conshies" whose objections were based on social or political grounds. In spite of his own instinctive conservatism, Stone doubted the wisdom of coerced conformity at the cost of conscience and strongly supported faculty dissenters, victims of Butler's repressive measures, thus foreshadowing his tolerant attitude on the Supreme Court toward freedom of thought and conscience.

Increasing dislike for administrative detail, the lure of a lucrative private practice, disaffection within the faculty, and distaste for continous wrangling with Nicholas Murray Butler led Stone to resign as dean on February 21, 1923. On April 1, 1924, President Coolidge, hoping to restore public confidence in the scandalplagued Department of Justice, headed by Harry M. Daugherty, named Stone attorney general. In trying to brighten the tarnished Justice Department, Stone's primary goal was recruitment of personnel unsullied by alliance with the underworld. William J. Burns was dismissed as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and replaced by twenty-nine-year-old J. Edgar Hoover on December 19, 1924.

Stone ordered scrupulous investigations of FBI applicants and a rigorous training period. Scotland Yard was his model, tempered by his concern lest "a secret police become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power. "

He campaigned for Coolidge in 1914, defending the president's purifying role in the Justice Department. Stone's nomination to the Supreme Court (succeeding Joseph McKenna) on January 5, 1925, quickly followed Coolidge's victory. Although attacked by certain senators opposed to his role in prosecuting antitrust cases, Stone was overwhelmingly confirmed, on February 5, 1925, by a vote of 71 to 6 and sworn in on March 2.

Stone's law school experience helped to prepare him for the Court.

At Columbia he had time and opportunity for study, research, and reflection, time to develop ideas on the nature of law and the function of courts. His law practice, although helpful, was not closely related to issues which confront a Supreme Court justice. Constitutional law had not been his specialty, either in teaching or in practice. Except as attorney general, he had argued only one case, Ownbey v. Morgan (1921), before the high Court. Here he suggested the major theme in his constitutional jurisprudence - judicial self-restraint. Correction of outmoded processes ought to be left, he argued, to legislatures rather than assumed by courts. The ideas Stone expounded in a series of lectures (later published as Law and Its Administration, 1915) at Columbia University have been regarded as conservative, even reactionary. But when, as a Supreme Court justice, he harshly attacked judicial distrust of social legislation, he was hailed as a liberal.

Stone's approach is revealed in his consideration of intergovernmental immunities from taxation - a vexing problem during the chief justiceships of both Taft and Hughes. Rejecting the reciprocal immunities doctrine established by McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Collector v. Day (1871), he held that the federal system does not establish "total want of power in one government to tax the instrumentalities of the other. " No formula sufficed to resolve the issue.

For him, the extent and locus of the tax burden were important considerations. Similarly, in cases involving government regulation of the economy and state taxation affecting interstate commerce, no question-begging formula as to "business affected with a public interest" or "direct and indirect effects" was adequate. All such legislation must be subjected to factual analysis.

This conviction usually aligned him with justices Holmes and Brandeis. Without minimizing the contributions of Holmes and Brandeis, Stone was the one who, in both the old Court (before 1937) and the new (after 1937), carried the Holmes-Brandeis tradition to fulfillment. Stone's constitutional jurisprudence crystallized in 1936, the heyday of judicial resistance to Roosevelt's massive New Deal program.

In United States v. Butler (1936), the Court, voting 6 to 3, outlawed the Agricultural Adjustment Act. At the end of the 1935-1936 term, the Court had, as Stone put it, "tied Uncle Sam up in a hard knot. " The mask of objectivity had been removed.

In 1936-1937, "government by judiciary" became a crucial political issue. On the heels of President Roosevelt's court-packing effort of 1937, the Court abandoned guardianship of property and contract rights as preferred freedoms. At first glance it seems paradoxical that Stone, who led the campaign for judicial self-restraint in cases involving regulation of the economy, should have articulated and rationalized another category of preferred freedoms entitled to "more exacting judicial scrutiny. "

In United States v. Carolene Products Company (1938), Stone suggested in the text of the opinion that the Court would not go so far as to say that no economic regulation would violate constitutional restraints, but he did indicate that henceforth the Court's role in this area would be strictly confined. Attached to this proposition is what is considered to be the most famous footnote in the Court's history, suggesting special judicial scrutiny in three areas: legislative encroachment on First Amendment freedoms; government action impeding or corrupting the political process; and official conduct adversely affecting the rights of racial, religious, or national minorities.

The Carolene Products footnote not only set the stage for a new era of judicial activism, but it also laid the ideological foundation for the Warren Court's revolutionary decisions in race relations, reapportionment, and rules of criminal procedure.

By 1938, Stone's name was identified with two seemingly contradictory postures: judicial self-restraint and preferred freedoms, which, according to the Carolene Products footnote, merited "more exacting judicial scrutiny than most other types of legislation. " Although Justice Frankfurter warmly endorsed both concepts, he differed sharply with Stone in their application.

He believed that unless the Court invokes its authority to preserve the rights deemed fundamental, especially the crucial preliminaries of the political process no free government can exist. By standing aside, as in the flag salute case, the Court, in effect, sanctioned coercion in the delicate realm of civil rights. Three years later, Stone's dissenting views prevailed in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette (1943).

On June 2, 1941, Chief Justice Hughes resigned at the age of seventy-nine. Speculation concerning Hughes' successor centered on Attorney General Robert H. Jackson and Associate Justice Stone. With the country close to the brink of World War II, the appointment of a Republican chief justice was considered good strategy. The choice of Stone seemed a fitting reward for the uphill battle he had waged, despite his strong misgivings, on behalf of the New Deal's constitutionality.

Hughes and Frankfurter favored Stone. Refuting the charge that he made party loyalty the primary qualification for appointment to the Supreme Court, Roosevelt passed over his popular attorney general and sent Stone's name to the Senate on June 12, 1941.

The highest judicial office in the land, which had eluded him in 1930 when his friend Herbert Hoover was in the White House, came from a Democrat toward whom he felt no political kinship. Stone's chief justiceship, however, was unimpressive. The bench Stone headed was the most frequently divided, the most openly quarrelsome in history.

Unlike his predecessors Taft and Hughes, he refused to resort to ingenious reasoning, good fellowship, the caucus, and other devices useful in keeping the Court unified. For him the Court's function was not only to decide cases, but also, through the clash of ideas, to find solutions considerate of the past, adequate for the present, and no obstacle to the future. Nevertheless, in his two full decades (1925 - 1946) on the Court, Stone left his mark on almost every type of case that came before it.

It seems ironical that this peace-loving man should have been caught in the cross fires of controversy throughout his judicial career. On the Taft Court (1925 - 1930), as during a good part of Chief Justice Hughes' regime (especially 1930 - 1937), Stone differed from colleagues on the right who interposed social and economic predilections under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. During his own chief justiceship, Stone clashed with colleagues on the left who appeared equally set on using judicial office to further political or personal preference.

Death from a massive cerebral hemorrhage came peacefully at 6:45 P. M.

Achievements

• Harlan Fiske Stone served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and as the 12th Chief Justice of the United States from 1941 to 1946. He was also the 52nd United States Attorney General. On the Hughes Court, Stone and Justices Brandeis and Cardozo formed a liberal bloc called the Three Musketeers that generally voted to uphold the constitutionality of the New Deal. His majority opinions in United States v. Darby Lumber Co. and United States v. Carolene Products Co. were influential in shaping standards of judicial scrutiny. Stone was the Chief Justice in Korematsu v. United States, ruling the exclusion of Japanese Americans into internment camps as constitutional. Amherst College named Stone Hall in his honor, upon its completion in 1964.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Us Postmarks and Cancellations (Seminar Textbook Series)

    (As excellent as the Philatelic Foundation's November 1990...)

  • U S Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation v. Chase Nat Bank of City of New York U.S. Supreme Court Transcript of Record with Supporting Pleadings

    (The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and ...)

  • Royal Italian Government v. National Brass & Copper Tube Co U.S. Supreme Court Transcript of Record with Supporting Pleadings

    (The Making of Modern Law: U.S. Supreme Court Records and ...)

  • Law and Its Administration

Politics

Although a habitual Republican, Stone realized that increased use of government, national and state, was a necessary concomitant of twentieth-century conditions.

Views

A firm believer in the Socratic method, he led his students inductively, case by case, to reach their own conclusions. Rigorous with himself as well as his students, he never faltered in his effort to develop responsible lawyers with disciplined minds and sensitive social consciences.

For him an intellectual elite was not the antithesis of democracy but its essential bulwark.

Stone's conception of the judicial function was almost monastic. He strove to keep the Court within what he considered appropriate bounds. A judge should confine himself to the issue at hand. Each case should be dealt with in the light of facts, legislative intent, precedent, and the judge's own reason and values. The Court ought "to correct its own errors, even if I helped to make them. " Stone's judicial technique stressed complexity. To oversimplify was convenient for the pedagogue, disastrous for the judge. Conflicting claims of the past must be measured against those of the present.

The judge would do well to weigh all this in terms of "a considered judgment of what the community may regard as within the limits of the reasonable. " The "sober second thought of the community, " he said, "is the firm base on which all law must ultimately rest. " Stone had an abiding faith in free government and in judicial review as an essential adjunct to its operation. For him radical change was neither necessary nor generally desirable. He believed that it could be avoided "if fear of legislative action, which Courts distrust or think unwise, is not over-emphasized in interpreting the document. "

Stone's guiding rule was judicial self-restraint, not judicial self-abnegation. He considered judicial review to be one of the auxiliary precautions envisioned by the founding fathers against abuse of power. personal conviction as law.

Quotations: "Law functions best only when it is fitted to the life of a people" .

"The hope and safeguard of democracy is education, " he proclaimed, "not that so-called education which would popularize learning at the cost of a sacrifice of standards, nor education in the narrow and technical sense, but the education which enlightens the masses as to the right relationship of the individual to the organization of society and inculcates a sense of individual responsibility for the preservation of that relationship on a sound basis of which law is only the outgrowth".

"Courts are not the only agency of government that must be presumed to have capacity to govern".

Membership

He was a member of the intimate group known as the Medicine Ball Cabinet. He was also a member of the Association of American Law Schools, a member of the American Bar Association, and a member of the Literary Society of Washington.

Personality

Chubby and good-natured, Harlan spent his boyhood "like that of many another New England farm boy. "

Later in life he was affable and cosmopolitan, a gourmet and a connoisseur of wines.

Quotes from others about the person

• Reynolds remarked, "his judicial attitude was a striking quality in his character. "
  
  Justice William O. Douglas remembered Stone as "one of the very best, if not the best, law teacher, we ever had. "

Interests

• Stone savored leisure, family, and hobbies. He enjoyed the outdoor life with his sons at his remote Isle au Haut cottage in Maine. Sharing his wife's interest in art, he encouraged her painting career. Together they visited galleries and museums here and on their extensive travels abroad. As chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery, he played an important role in expanding its collections and rescuing European art treasures during World War II. Stone also served on committees of the Smithsonian Institution and the Folger Library.

Connections

On September 7, 1899, he married his childhood sweetheart, Agnes Harvey, and settled in New York City.

Father:

Frederick Lauson Stone

Mother:

Anne (Butler) Stone

Wife:

Agnes Harvey

colleague:

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo

colleague:

Robert H. Jackson

colleague:

Louis Dembitz Brandeis

Son:

Marshall Harvey Stone

Son:

Lauson Harvey Stone

Friend:

Jackson E. Reynolds

Friend:

Dwight Morrow

Friend:

Sterling Carr

Friend:

Hermon C. Harvey

References

• Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone - Supreme Court Card Signed
• Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone - Inscribed Photograph Mount Signed
• MEN AND BOOKS FAMOUS IN THE LAW. With an Introduction by Harlan F. Stone, Dean, Columbia University Law School. Rochester, New York: The Lawyers Co-Operative Publishing Co. 1921.
• Men and Books Famous in the Law. With an introduction by Harlan F. Stone.