Supreme Court Justice - Case Study Example

John Marshall Harlan I & II Harlan family legacy and unique contribution to the history of Supreme Court is extraordinary. It is remarkable account of the legacy of two justices from one family. Unique in the history of the U.S. Judiciary is the service of two Harlans as associate justices of the Supreme Court-John Marshall Harlan and his grandson, John Marshall Harlan II. Both were raised to the law and both served with diligence, intelligence and integrity. Their contribution to the U.S. Judiciary is significant and noteworthy. The elder Judge Harlan was born June 1, 1833, at Harlan's Station in Boyle County, Kentucky. John Marshall I was well educated-first in a private academy, then Centre College in Danville and later in law school at Transylvania University in Lexington. He joined his father's law practice before entering politics. John Marshall Harlan vigorously defended slavery and thought the government should not interfere, but at the same time, he believed that the Union must be preserved and even enlisted in the Union Army in 1861. His family background played a part in his racial attitudes. John Marshall Harlan was confirmed by the Senate in December, 1877, and was the 45th justice of the Supreme Court. 'John Marshall Harlan II' (May 20, 1899 - December 29, 1971) was an American jurist. He served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1955 to 1971. He was the grandson of another Associate Justice, John Marshall Harlan, who served from 1877 to 1911. Harlan is often characterized as a member of the conservative wing of the Warren Court. He advocated a limited role for the judiciary, remarking that the Supreme Court should not be considered "a general haven for reform movements." In general, Harlan adhered more closely to precedent, and was more reluctant to overturn legislation, than many of his colleagues on the Court. He strongly disagreed with the doctrine of incorporation, which held that the guarantees of the federal Bill of Rights were applicable at the state level. At the same time, he advocated a broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, arguing that it protected a wide range of rights not expressly mentioned in the Constitution. Harlan is sometimes called the "great dissenter" of the Warren Court, and is often regarded as one of the most influential Supreme Court justices in the twentieth century.( Yarborough,1992) John Marshall Harlan II was born on May 20, 1899 in Chicago, Illinois. He was the son of John Maynard Harlan (a Chicago lawyer and politician) and Elizabeth Flagg. Harlan's family had, historically, been a politically active one. His father, George Harlan, served as Governor of Delaware during the seventeenth century; his great-grandfather, James Harlan, was a congressman during the 1830s; and his grandfather, John Marshall Harlan, was a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. In his younger years, Harlan attended The Latin School of Chicago. Harlan later attended two boarding high schools in Canada, Upper Canada College in Toronto, and Appleby College also near Toronto. Upon graduation from Appleby, Harlan returned to the U.S. and enrolled at Princeton University. There, he was a member of the Ivy Club, served as an editor of "The Daily Princetonian", (Yarborough ,1992) and was class president during his junior and senior years. After graduating from the university in 1920, he received a Rhodes Scholarship, which he used to attend Balliol College, Oxford.(Leitch,1978) He studied jurisprudence at Oxford for three years, returning from England in 1923. Upon his return to the United States, he began work with the law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland (now known as Dewey Ballantine), one of the leading law firms in the country, while studying law at New York Law School. He received his law degree in 1924 and earned admission to the bar in 1925. In 1928, he married Ethel Andrews, with whom he had one daughter, Eva Dillingham.(Ariens) Between 1925 and 1927, Harlan served as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, heading the district's Prohibition unit. In 1928, he was appointed Special Assistant Attorney General of New York, in which capacity he investigated a scandal involving sewer construction in Queens. He prosecuted Maurice E. Connolly, the Queens borough president, for his involvement in the affair. In 1930, Harlan returned to his old law firm, reaching the rank of partner one year later. In 1937, Harlan was one of five founders of the controversial Pioneer Fund, a group associated with eugenics advocacy. In private practice, he handled a variety of notable cases. In 1940, for example, he represented the New York Board of Higher Education in its unsuccessful effort to retain Bertrand Russell on the faculty of the City College of New York; Russell was declared "morally unfit" to teach. During World War II, Harlan volunteered for military duty, serving as a colonel in the United States Army Air Force from 1943 to 1945. He was the chief of the Operational Analysis Section of the Eighth Air Force in England. He won the Legion of Merit from the United States, and the croix de guerre from both France and Belgium. In 1946, soon after the end of the war, Harlan returned to private law practice. In 1951, however, he returned to public service, serving as Chief Counsel to the New York State Crime Commission.(Shapiro,1969) On January 13, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated Harlan to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to fill a vacancy created by the death of Judge Augustus Noble Hand. He was confirmed by the Senate on February 9, and took office on February 10.(Federal Judicial Center)Harlan knew this court well, as he had often appeared before it. However, his stay on the court only lasted for about one year. On January 10, 1955, President Eisenhower nominated Harlan to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Robert H. Jackson. Harlan's nomination came shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954), declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Several Southern senators who wanted to delay the implementation of this ruling attempted to block Harlan's confirmation. Unlike almost all previous Supreme Court nominees, Harlan appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions relating to his judicial views. (This appearance set a new precedent; since Harlan, every Supreme Court nominee has been questioned by the Judiciary Committee.(United States Senate) The Senate finally confirmed him on March 16, 1955 by a vote of 71-11. Of the eleven senators that voted against his appointment, nine were from the South. He was replaced on the Second Circuit by Joseph Edward Lumbard. On the Supreme Court, Harlan often voted alongside Justice Felix Frankfurter. Moreover, he was an ally and close friend of Justice Potter Stewart, who joined the Court in 1958. He was an ideological adversary-but close personal friend-of Justice Hugo Black, with whom he disagreed on a variety of issues, including the applicability of the Bill of Rights to the states, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause. Harlan's jurisprudence is often characterized as conservative. He held precedent to be of great importance, adhering to the principle of "stare decisis" more closely than many of his Supreme Court colleagues. Unlike his contemporary Hugo Black, he eschewed strict textualism. While he believed that the original intention of the Framers should play an important part in constitutional adjudication, he also held that broad phrases like "liberty" in the Due Process Clause could be given an evolving interpretation. Harlan believed that most problems should be solved by the political process, and that the judiciary should play only a limited role. In his dissent to "Reynolds v. Sims" (1964), he wrote: These decisions give support to a current mistaken view of the Constitution and the constitutional function of this court. This view, in a nutshell, is that every major social ill in this country can find its cure in some constitutional principle and that this court should take the lead in promoting reform when other branches of government fail to act. The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare nor should this court, ordained as a judicial body, be thought of as a general haven of reform movements. "Reynolds v. Sims", 377 US 533 (1964). (Harlan, J., dissenting). Justice Harlan advocated a broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause. He subscribed to the doctrine that the clause not only provided procedural guarantees, but also protected a wide range of fundamental rights, including those that were not specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution. However, as Justice Byron White noted in his dissenting opinion in "Moore v. East Cleveland", "no one was more sensitive than Mr. Justice Harlan to any suggestion that his approach to the Due Process Clause would lead to judges 'roaming at large in the constitutional field. "Griswold v. Connecticut" (Harlan, J., concurring in the judgment), 81 U.S. 479, 501-502) Harlan set forth his interpretation in an oft-cited dissenting opinion to "Poe v. Ullman" (1961), which involved a challenge to a Connecticut law banning the use of contraceptives. The Supreme Court dismissed the case on technical grounds, holding that the case was not ripe for adjudication. Justice Harlan dissented from the dismissal, suggesting that the Court should have considered the merits of the case. Thereafter, he indicated his support for a broad view of the due process clause's reference to "liberty" (Poe v. Ullman,1961) He suggested that the due process clause encompassed a right to privacy, and concluded that a prohibition on contraception violated this right. The same law was challenged again in "Griswold v. Connecticut" (1965). This time, the Supreme Court agreed to consider the case, and concluded that the law violated the Constitution. However, the decision was based not on the due process clause, but on the argument that a right to privacy was found in the "penumbras" of other provisions of the Bill of Rights. Justice Harlan concurred in the result, but criticized the Court for relying on the Bill of Rights in reaching its decision. "The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment stands," he wrote, "on its own bottom."(1965) The Supreme Court would later adopt Harlan's approach, relying on the due process clause rather than the penumbras of the Bill of Rights in right to privacy cases such as "Roe v. Wade" (1972) and "Lawrence v. Texas" (2003). Harlan's interpretation of the Due Process Clause attracted the criticism of Justice Black. Black rejected the idea that the Due Process Clause included a "substantive" component; he considered this interpretation unjustifiably broad and historically unsound. The Supreme Court has sided with Harlan, and has continued to apply the doctrine of substantive due process in a wide variety of cases. (Shapiro, 1969) During the 1960s, the Warren Court made a series of rulings expanding the rights of criminal defendants. Most notably, Harlan dissented from Supreme Court rulings restricting interrogation techniques used by law enforcement officers. For example, he dissented from the Court's holding in "Escobedo v. Illinois" (1964) that the police could not refuse to honor a suspect's request to consult with his lawyer during an interrogation. Harlan called the rule "ill-conceived" and suggested that it "unjustifiably fetters perfectly legitimate methods of criminal law enforcement." He disagreed with "Miranda v. Arizona" (1965), which required law enforcement officials to warn a suspect of his rights before questioning him. He closed his dissenting opinion with a quotation from his predecessor, Justice Robert Jackson: "This Court is forever adding new stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have a way of collapsing when one story too many is added."(Miranda v Arizona, 1966) In "Gideon v. Wainwright" (1963), Justice Harlan agreed that the Constitution required states to provide attorneys for defendants who could not afford their own counsel. However, he believed that this requirement applied only at trial, and not on appeal; thus, he dissented from "Douglas v. California" (1963). Harlan was the author of "Leary v. United States", a case that declared Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional based on the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.(Shapiro,1969) As recently as 1969, Justice John Marshall Harlan, the Court's most distinguished conservative member after Felix Frankfurter's retirement, had noted that the Supreme Court had consistently "rejected all manner of prior restraint on publication." Floyd Abrams, in reference to freedom of the press. (Floyd) He carefully weighed both formal interpretation and social impact when making a decision and granted especial importance to precedent. He was assiduous in creating opinions that could serve as a basis for decisions in future cases. He sought to protect a balance between federal and state powers, protecting states from zealous attempts to regulate their law enforcement or limit their experiments in social planning. He felt that politics, not the courts, was the correct arena for addressing such issues and stated: "The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare nor should this court ... be thought of as a general haven of reform movements." Harlan became important conservative voice on the largely liberal Court. Harlan embraced common-law principles of interpretation and rejected strict textual reading of the Constitution and attempts to interpret according to what it's Framers "actually meant."(Dorsen,2001) Work Cited Leitch, Alexander. (1978) A Princeton Companion, Princeton University Press, 1978, Ariens, Michael. "John Marshall Harlan II." Federal Judicial Center. "Marshall, John Harlan." United States Senate. "Nominations." "Poe v. Ullman'', 367 U.S. 497 (1961). (Harlan, J., dissenting). ''Griswold v. Connecticut'', 381 U.S. 479 (1965). (Harlan, J., concurring). Conversations: Robert Bork says, Give me liberty, but don't give me filth Christianity Today ''Roth v. United States'', 354 U.S. 476 (1957). (Harlan, J., dissenting). ''Miranda v. Arizona'', 384 U.S. 436 (1966). (Harlan, J., dissenting). ''Wesberry v. Sanders'', 376 U.S. 1 (1964). (Harlan, J., dissenting). ''Carrington v. Rash'', 380 U.S. 89 (1965). (Harlan, J., dissenting). Floyd Abrams, ''Speaking Freely'', published by Viking Press, Page 15-16. Dorsen, Norman. (Editor). (2001). ''John Marshall Harlan II: Remembrances by his Law Clerks.'' Shapiro, David L. (Editor). (1969). ''The Evolution of a Judicial Philosophy: Selected Opinions and Papers of Justice John M. Harlan.'' Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1969. Yarborough, Tinsley E. (1992). ''John Marshall Harlan : Great Dissenter of the Warren Court.'' New York: Oxford University Press. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.plnavby=case&court=us&vol=377&invol=533 Read More