Justice Edward Terry Sanford
Today’s Justice of the Day is: EDWARD TERRY SANFORD. Justice Sanford was born on this day, July 23, in 1865.
Justice Sanford was born in present day Knoxville, Tennessee, in the state where he was raised, spent much of his professional life and from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He attended the University of Tennessee, graduating with a B.A. and Ph.B. in 1883, before moving on to Harvard University, where he earned a B.A. in 1885 and an M.A. in 1889, and finally, Harvard Law School, which he graduated from with an LL.B. in 1889.
Justice Sanford entered private practice in his home town of Knoxville the year after his graduation from law school, and worked as a private attorney continuously for almost two decades. Concurrent with his private legal career, he also became a lecturer at the University Of Tennessee School of Law in 1889, and began his brief career at the United States Department of Justice as a special assistant to the Attorney General of the United States in 1905. In 1907, Justice Sanford left private practice, the University of Tennessee and his then-current position as a special assistant to move up the ranks of the DOJ, becoming an Assistant Attorney General that year. He held that office until 1908, when he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt to be a Judge of both the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Justice Sanford remained in those concurrently held positions until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Sanford was nominated by President Warren G. Harding on January 24, 1923, at the urging of Chief Justice William Howard Taft, his friend and mentor, to a seat vacated by Justice Mahlon Pitney. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 29, and received his commission that day. Justice Sanford took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on February 19, and served on the Taft and Hughes Courts (the latter of which he only served on for a little over one week). His service was terminated on March 8, 1930, due to his death, which coincidentally occurred on the exact same day as Chief Justice Taft’s passing.
Justice Sanford seemed to return the loyalty Chief Justice Taft showed in lobbying for his nomination by voting with him and his conservative block regularly, and by participating in the "inner club" of conservative Justices who met at Chief Justice Taft’s home on Sunday afternoons. Yet Justice Sanford was not without his complexity, as seen in his perhaps most consequential opinion, written for a 7-to-2 majority in the case of Gitlow v. New York (1925), which helped lay the foundation for much of the civil liberties revolution of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Justice Sanford’s ruling held that the conviction of the appellant, Benjamin Gitlow, an avowed socialist, could be upheld as constitutional (which is why Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis dissented), but also affirmed that the First Amendment should be applied to the states via the 14th Amendment. The latter part of that opinion was one of the earliest steps taken by the SCUS to begin incorporating the Bill of Rights into state law, a line of thinking that would be used to profoundly alter the American legal landscape in the hands of later, more liberal Members of the Court, such as Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall.