Justice George Sutherland
Today’s Justice of the Day is: GEORGE SUTHERLAND. Justice Sutherland was born on this day, March 25, in 1862.
Justice Sutherland was born in Buckinghamshire, England, making him one of only six Members of the Supreme Court of the United States to have been born overseas. His family converted to Mormonism and subsequently moved to Utah, the state from which he would be appointed to the SCUS (he himself would later convert to Presbyterianism, a decision that was almost certainly a major factor in the defeat of his 1916 bid for a third term in the United States Senate). Justice Sutherland attended the University of Michigan Law School, though he never graduated.
Justice Sutherland began an 18 year-long stint in private practice in Provo, Utah in 1883, where he would remain for a decade, after which he moved to Salt Lake City, Utah to continue working as a private attorney; during that time he was also a Utah State Senator (from 1897 to 1901). He began a year-long term as a Member of the United States House of Representatives in 1901, and became a U.S. Senator from his adopted home state in 1905. Justice Sutherland left the U.S. Senate (following his aforementioned defeat for reelection) in 1917, before subsequently entering private practice in Washington, D.C. later that same year, where he would remain until his appointment to the SCUS.
Justice Sutherland was nominated by President Warren G. Harding to a seat vacated by Justice John Hessin Clarke, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and received his commission, on September 5, 1922. He took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on October 2, and served on the Taft and Hughes Courts. Justice Sutherland assumed senior status on January 17, 1938, and his service was terminated on July 18, 1942, due to his death.
Justice Sutherland is most well-remembered for having been one of the Four Horsemen, a group of SCUS Justices who formed a four-Member conservative block that attempted to strike down huge swathes of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. While Justice Sutherland and his allies enjoyed much success in their efforts early on, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes’ and Justice Owen Roberts’ decision to move the center and stop assisting them seriously eroded their effectiveness. Later changes to the SCUS’s composition, specifically President Roosevelt’s appointment of more and more left-leaning Justices, would completely end the Four Horsemen’s influence. While Justice Sutherland may have been very influential early in his career at the SCUS, a great many of the opinions he wrote or joined, as well as much of the underlying judicial philosophy they articulated, have since been swept away by subsequent courts.