Justice Harold Hitz Burton
Today’s Justice of the Day is: HAROLD HITZ BURTON. Justice Burton was born on this day, June 22, in 1888.
Justice Burton was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and graduated with an A.B. from Bowdoin College in Maine in 1909. He went on to earn an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1912.
Immediately after graduating from law school, Justice Burton entered private practice in Ohio, the state where he would spend his entire professional career and from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Then from 1914 to 1917 he served as an attorney in various capacities at several utilities, including the Utah Power and Light Company, the Utah Light and Traction Company and the Idaho Power Company. Justice Burton briefly left the legal profession in 1917 to fight in the First World War as a United States Army lieutenant, serving until 1919, just after the war’s end. He then immediately returned to the U.S. and took up private practice in Cleveland, Ohio until 1935, a period during which he served in the Ohio House of Representative in 1929 and was Director of Law for the City of Cleveland from 1929 to 1931. Justice Burton, a life-long Republican, was elected Mayor of Cleveland in 1935, and served in that office until his election to represent Ohio in the United States Senate in 1940. He took office the following year and remained there until his elevation to the SCUS, during which time he earned the respect of a colleague who would prove to be very consequential in Justice Burton’s life: then-Senator Harry S. Truman.
Justice Burton was nominated by President Truman on September 18, 1945, to a seat vacated by Justice Owen J. Roberts. One supposedly major factor in his selection was his party affiliation, as President Truman is said to have wanted to show bipartisan cooperation by not replacing the last Republican-appointed Justice with a partisan Democrat. Justice Burton was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 19, and received his commission three days later. He took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on October 1, 1945, and served on the Stone, Vinson and Warren Courts. Justice Burton was forced to assume senior status on October 13, 1958, owing to the onset of Parkinson’s disease, and his service was terminated on October 28, 1964, due to his death.
Justice Burton’s career on the SCUS was not particularly distinguished, though some have described him as having been crucial to the Supreme Court’s move away from the Stone and Vinson Courts’ emphasis on government power and towards the support for individual rights that was the hallmark of the Warren Court. Justice Burton's tenure saw him join the opinion of a unanimous Court in perhaps the most famous set of cases in SCUS history: Brown v. Board of Education (I) (1952) and Brown v. Board of Education (II) (1954), the cases that reversed the SCUS's long-standing practice of accepting institutionalized racial discrimination under the guise of "separate but equal".