Robert Houghwout Jackson was United States Solicitor General (1938–1940), United States Attorney General (1940–1941) and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1941–1954). He is the only person in United States history to have held all three of those offices.
Background
Robert Houghwout Jackson was born in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania, on February 13, 1892, the son of William Eldred Jackson and Angelina Houghwout Jackson. During his early childhood, Jackson’s family moved to western New York, near Jamestown, where his father ran a livery stable and a hotel.
Education
Jackson’s formal education ended, for the most part, on his graduation from Jamestown High School in 1911. He spent a year at Albany Law School, but he gained his legal education chiefly by “reading law” with his cousin, Frank H. Mott. Though a common form of preparation for a legal career in the 19th century, these informal apprenticeships were gradually replaced by law schools. Jackson was the last Supreme Court justice whose legal education followed the older pattern.
Career
After Roosevelt's election to the U. S. presidency in 1932, Jackson went to Washington to serve as general counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. After serving as assistant attorney general in charge of the Tax Division of the Department of Justice, and then as head of the Antitrust Division, he was named solicitor general in 1938. In 1940 he became attorney general and in 1941 took his oath as associate justice of the Supreme Court. During Jackson's tenure one of the chief public issues was the role and power of the Supreme Court. In his book The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy (1941) Jackson castigated the Court's willingness to establish itself as a superlegislature over the decisions of the popularly elected Congress and president; he called for a more restrained role. With some notable exceptions, Jackson continued this argument throughout his years on the Court. In one of his first major opinions, in 1942, the Federal government was granted extremely broad powers of economic regulation under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. Concerning the nation's economy, supremacy was placed firmly in the hands of Congress. Devoted to civil liberties, Jackson worked to determine how the Court could protect unpopular minorities against persecution and oppression by inflamed majority rule. In 1943 he delivered an opinion for the Court upholding the constitutional right of Jehovah's Witnesses (a religious group) to refuse to salute the American flag. Toward the end of his life, however, he joined Justice Felix Frankfurter in thinking that the Court should play a relatively minor role in protecting civil liberties. In his posthumous The Supreme Court in the American System of Government (1955), Jackson attacked the civil libertarian views of his colleagues Hugo Black and William O. Douglas. Justice Jackson left the Court for a year in 1945-1946 to serve as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials in Germany. Two books by him came out of this experience: The Case against the Nazi War Criminals (1946) and The Nuremberg Case (1947).
On the Court, Justice Jackson established a reputation as a strong proponent of national power and of judicial restraint. Writing for a majority of the Court in Wickard v. Filburn (1942), Jackson validated an expansive view of Congressional power over interstate commerce. In Wickard, his opinion for the Court held that Congress had the power to regulate even pri-vate use and consumption of wheat by a farmer insofar as—considered in the aggregate with many other farmers—one farmer’s use of his crop had a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Thus, Congress was empowered to regulate the use of wheat even if it was not intended to be marketed. As he later famously explained the breadth of Congress’s power under die Constitution’s commerce clause, if it is “interstate commerce diat feels the pinch, it does not matter how local the operation which applies the squeeze.”
In the area of civil liberties, Jackson tended to join Justice Felix Frankfurter in cautioning the Court against aggressive uses of its power, as justices such as William O. Douglas and Hugo Black favored. In Terminiello v. Chicago (1949), for example, he parted ways with a majority of the Court by dissenting from the decision overturning the conviction of a man for breach of the peace, after he delivered a speech that threatened to spark a riot. The majority, he thought, paid too little attention to the value of public order; and he warned that “if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”
Views
Quotations:
"Any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect, in no uncertain terms, to make no statement to the police under any circumstances. "
"We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final. "
Connections
In 1916 he married Irene Gerhardt, and this marriage ultimately produced two children—a son and a daughter. The son, William Eldred Jackson, became a lawyer himself, and served as a personal aide to his father when Robert Jackson led the American legal delegation at the Nuremberg trials.