Chief Justice Frederick M. Vinson
Today’s Justice of the Day is: FREDERICK M. VINSON. Chief Justice Vinson was born on this day, January 22, in 1890.
Chief Justice Vinson was born in rural Louisa, Kentucky. He graduated from Centre College with a B.A. in 1909, and then earned an LL.B. from the College of Law of Central University in 1911.
Chief Justice Vinson entered private practice in his home town of Louisa immediately upon graduating from law school, working there initially for six years; during this time he also served as Louisa’s city attorney in 1913. He briefly left his work as a private attorney for a two year stint as a United States Army Private and Officer Trainee in 1917, after which he returned to Louisa for the next five years. Chief Justice Vinson served as a Commonwealth Attorney of the Thirty-Second Judicial District of Kentucky from 1921 to 1924, and was a Member of the United States House of Representatives from his home state from 1923 to 1929 and 1931 to 1938 (he worked in private practice in Ashland, Kentucky during the brief break in his House career). He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937, and his service on that court was terminated in 1943, due to his resignation The year before he left the DC Circuit, Chief Justice Vinson began serving as Chief Judge of the United States Emergency Court of Appeals, a position he would leave the following year upon becoming the Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization (where he served from 1943 to 1945). In 1945, he was Administrator of the Federal Loan Administration and Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Chief Justice Vinson also began serving as Secretary of the Treasury that year, where he would remain until his elevation to the SCUS.
Chief Justice Vinson was nominated by President Harry S. Truman on June 6, 1946, to a seat vacated by Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on June 20, and received his commission the following day. Chief Justice Vinson took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on June 24, and his service was terminated on September 8, 1953, due to his death.
Chief Justice Vinson is probably the SCUS’s least well-remembered leader in the post-Second World War era, owing to his tenure’s relative brevity and lack of especially high profile cases. Yet he undeniably played a fairly significant role in shaping how SCUS jurisprudence would evolve throughout the mid-20th century, and was particularly influential on race issues, an area where he used multiple cases, such as Sweatt v. Painter (1950), which held that the University of Texas Law School could not establish a segregated facility that African America students would be compelled to attend under the 14th Amendment, to chip away at the foundations of institutionalized racism. Chief Justice Vinson’s efforts in this regard would set the stage for his successor, Chief Justice Earl Warren, to sweep away racial segregation as a matter of constitutionally-endorsed public policy in decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education (I) (1954).