Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone
Today’s Justice of the Day is: HARLAN FISKE STONE. Chief Justice Stone was born on this day, October 11, in 1872.
Chief Justice Stone was born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, earning a B.A. in 1894 and an M.A. in 1897, before going on to receive an LL.B. in 1898 from Columbia Law School in New York, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Chief Justice Stone joined the faculty of his law school alma mater immediately upon graduation, and started a one year stint as a clerk in private practice in New York City at the same time. In 1905, he entered private practice in New York City and then served as a Professor and Dean at Columbia in 1906, before leaving the school temporarily later that same year. Chief Justice Stone returned to his law school alma mater after ceasing work as a private attorney in 1910, where he was made Dean and would remain until 1923. He served as Attorney General of the United States the following year.
Chief Justice Stone was nominated to serve as an Associate Justice by President Calvin Coolidge on January 5, 1925, to a seat vacated by Justice Joseph McKenna. He was confirmed to that position by the United States Senate on February 5, received his commission that day, and served his tenure as an Associate Justice on the Taft and Hughes Courts. Chief Justice Stone was later nominated to serve as Chief Justice of the United States by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 12, 1941, to a seat vacated by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on June 27, and then received his commission and took the Judicial Oath to become Chief Justice on July 3. Chief Justice Stone’s service was terminated on April 22, 1946, due to his death.
Despite his having been appointed by a Republican president, Chief Justice Stone became one of the “Three Musketeers,” along with Justices Louis Brandeis and Benjamin N. Cardozo, a group of jurists who became famous for opposing the overwhelmingly conservative, anti-New Deal agenda of the “Four Horseman,” namely Justices Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Pierce Butler. His tenure as Chief Justice saw the SCUS slowly dissolve into deep division on matters of personal liberty and race, conflicts that would go unresolved until the Warren Court decisively tilted the balance towards its left-leaning Members. Chief Justice Stone’s own divided views on such questions, mirroring that of the larger SCUS to some extent, is best exemplified by the infamous Korematsu v. U.S. (1944) decision, wherein he joined the Court in declaring that laws which discriminated on the basis of race were by nature suspect, a first in SCUS history, while reaffirming the right of the government to expel citizens of Japanese descent from certain parts of the country. He is also the only Member of the SCUS to have ever occupied every single position of seniority on the Court, moving from most junior all the way to most senior Associate Justice, and then to Chief Justice.