Edward Terry Sanford was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1923 until his death in 1930. Prior to his nomination to the high court, Sanford served as an Assistant Attorney General under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1905 to 1907, and as a federal district court judge from 1908 to 1923. Sanford is typically viewed as a conservative justice, favoring strict adherence to antitrust laws,
Background
Edward Terry Sanford was born on July 23, 1865, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the eldest child of Edward J. Sanford and Emma Chavannes Sanford. His father, a transplanted Yankee, had become wealthy in the lumber and construction business. His mother, Swiss by birth, saw to it that her firstborn son acquired through education a cosmopolitan outlook, free of the narrow sectionalism that might otherwise have gripped him.
Education
After preparation in private schools, Sanford attended the University of Tennessee, where, at the age of 18, he graduated in 1883 first in his class. With a B.A. and a Ph.B. (a bachelor of philosophy) from Temiessee in hand, Sanford promptly enrolled in Harvard University, where he received his second bachelor’s degree two years later. By 1886 he had been admitted to Harvard Law' School, where he served as an editor for the newly founded Harvard. Law Review. With a brief intermission from his studies to pass the Tennessee bar exam in 1888, Sanford remained at Harvard Law School for three years, earning his M.A. and LL.B. As if these educational accomplishments were not enough, Sanford then traveled to Europe, where he studied French and German for a year.
Career
When he returned from Europe in 1890, Sanford joined the firm of Andrews and Thornburgh in Knoxville. The following year he married Lurie Mallory Woodruff, with whom he would have two daughters. Sanford practiced law in Knoxville for nearly 17 years, but he also devoted considerable time to civic activities, including service as a trustee of the University of Temiessee beginning in 1897. Over the years, the Tennessean would undertake an impressive array of civic responsibilities, which included work as chairman of the board of the George Peabody College of Teachers, alumni president for Harvard and the University of Tennessee, and vice president of the American Bar Association. His work in support of the American entrance into the League of Nations after World War I made a favorable impression on Chief Justice William Howard Taft and President Warren G. Harding’s attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty. Both men would, in time, play a significant part in Sanford’s appointment to the Supreme Court.
Edward Sanford’s public career began in 1905, when he assumed the position of special assistant to the U.S. attorney general to help prosecute a business monopoly known as the fertilizer trust. Two years later he assumed the position of assistant attorney general in the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt and so impressed Roosevelt that the president appointed Sanford as a federal district judge lor Tennessee in 1908. For the next 15 years, Sanford forged a reputation as an able, conscientious, and courteous judge, leaving his position as a district judge finally when President Warren G. Harding, with the encouragement of Chief Justice Taft and Attorney General Daugherty, appointed him to the Supreme Court on January 24, 1923. The Senate confirmed the nomination within the week and Sanford took his seat as an associate justice of the Supreme Court on February 5,1923.
Politics
Though never a prominent figure on the Court, Justice Sanford nevertheless made several important contributions to modern constitutional law during his seven years as an associate justice. In particular, he spoke for the Court in two important First Amendment cases, Gitlow v. New York (1925) and Whitney v. California (1927), that established the applicability of the free speech guarantee to state laws that restricted speech. The First Amendment, by its terms, declares that “Congress” shall not make any laws abridging the freedom of speech; thus, as originally framed, it offered no protection from state laws that abridged the freedom of speech. But the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in the wake of the Civil War, prohibits states from depriving persons of “life, liberty, or property” without “due process of law.” Eventually the Court came to consider whether the protection of “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause might be understood to make the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee applicable to the states. In Gitlow and Whitney, Sanford delivered the Court’s opinion declaring that the First Amendment’s protection of speech was indeed applicable to state and local governments, that it had been “incorporated” by rite terms of the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. The Court eventually applied the incorporation doctrine to find that most of the provi-sions of the Bill of Rights, though originally restrictions only on the federal government, were applicable to state and local governments as well.
Although the announcement of this incorporation principle would become a crucial featurc in the modern constitutional protection of speech, the actual results reached by Sanford and a majority of the Court in Gitlow and Whitney permitted the punishment of speech. In Gitlow, the Court sustained the conviction of a member of the Socialist party' who had been prosecuted under a state law that made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of government. Gitlow, the defendant in die case, published a leaflet that urged the establishment of socialism by “class action ... in any form.” Writing for a majority of the Court, Justice Sanford concluded that Git- low’s speech could be punished. “A single revolutionary spark may kindle a fire that, smoldering for a time, may burst into a sweeping and destructive conflagration.” Sanford was no more solicitous of speech in Whitney v. California (1927). There he concluded for die Court that punishment of an individual for mere member-ship in an organization that promoted violence to effect industrial or political change did no violence to freedom of speech.
Membership
Member of the board of govs. Member and Chairman.
Connections
Married Lutie Mallory Woodruff, January 6, 1891. Children: Dorothy (deceased), Anna Magee.