Justice Stanley Forman Reed
Today’s Justice of the Day is: STANLEY FORMAN REED. Justice Reed was born on this day, December 31, in 1884.
Justice Reed was born to a fairly well-to-do family from the rural community of Minerva, Kentucky, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He earned two B.A.’s, one from Kentucky Wesleyan College in 1902 and the other from Yale College in 1906; he also attended Columbia Law School and the University of Virginia School of Law, though he did not receive a J.D., and would later become the last serving Member of the SCUS who did not finish law school.
Justice Reed entered private practice in Maysville and Ashland, Kentucky in 1910, and worked as a private attorney until he began a three-year stint as General Counsel for the Federal Farm Bureau in 1929. During this time he also served as a Member of the Kentucky House of Representatives (from 1912 to 1916) and a First Lieutenant in the Intelligence Division of the United States Army (from 1917 to 1918). Justice Reed became General Counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932, a position he held from then to 1935, the year he began serving as Solicitor General of the United States, where he would remain until his appointment to the SCUS.
Justice Reed was nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 15, 1938, to a seat vacated by Justice George Sutherland. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 25, and received his commission two days later. Justice Reed took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on January 31, and served on the Hughes, Stone, Vinson, and Warren Courts. He assumed senior status on February 25, 1957, and his service was terminated on April 2, 1980, due to his death.
Justice Reed is not especially well-known today, though he served during a time when the SCUS was taking on some of its most famous cases, including Brown v. Board of Education I (1954), where he joined a unanimous court in holding that formalized racial segregation in schooling violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause; it has been noted that he, along with Justice Robert H. Jackson, was one of the longest hold-outs when the Court was resolving Brown, and had initially seemed inclined to affirm the odious decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) (which had held that racial segregation was not unconstitutional) until his colleagues – and Chief Justice Earl Warren in particular – persuaded him otherwise. His support for civil rights was not completely consistent, as he also joined with the majority in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in claiming that the internment of Japanese Americans during the then-ongoing Second World War did not violate the Constitution.