Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed

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Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed

Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL AUTOGRAPH BEAUTIFULLY MATTED 11X14 INCHES AND PROTECTED IN PLASTIC OF SUPREME COURT JJSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES CHARLES E. HUGHES WHICH COME WITH THE ORIGINAL MAILING ENVELOPE FROM 1931 AND A PORTRAIT OF CHARLES E. Charles Evans Hughes Sr. Was an American statesman, politician and jurist who served as the 11th Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. Nicknamed the “roving Justices, ” new Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts sometimes joined the “four horsemen”-Justices George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, James C. McReynolds, and Willis Van Devanter–sometimes joined three Judges more willing to accept laws however meddlesome. These three were Louis D. Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, and Oliver Wendell Holmes until he retired in 1932. Cardozo succeeded him, and often voted with Brandeis and Stone. In 1925, while the Court was deciding the Benjamin Gitlow case, Minnesota legislators were passing a new statute. It provided that a court order could silence, as “public nuisances, ” periodicals that published “malicious, scandalous, and defamatory” material. “Unfortunately we are both former editors of a local scandal sheet, a distinction we regret, ” conceded J. Near and his partner in the first issue of the Saturday Press, but they promised to fight crime in Minneapolis. They called the police chief a “cuddler of criminals” who protected rat gamblers. They abused the county attorney, who sued Near; the state’s highest court ordered the paper suppressed. Citing the Schenck and Gitlow decisions, Near’s lawyer appealed to the Supreme Court, which struck down the state law in 1931. For four dissenters, Pierce Butler quoted with evident distaste Near’s outbursts at “snake-faced” Jewish gangsters; peace and order need legal protection from such publishers, Butler insisted. For the majority, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes analyzed this “unusual, if not unique” law. If anyone published something “scandalous” a Minnesota court might close his paper permanently for damaging public morals. But charges of corruption in office always make public scandals, Hughes pointed out. Anyone defamed in print may sue for libel, he added emphatically. However disgusting Near’s words, said Hughes, the words of the Constitution controlled the decision, and they demand a free press without censorship. Criticism may offend public officials, it may even remove them from office; but trashy or trenchant, the press may not be suppressed by law. How citizens use liberty has confronted the Justices again and again, in cases of violence as well as scandal. Alabama militia had machine guns on the courthouse roof, said newspaper reports from Scottsboro; mobs had a band playing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”; and amid the clamor, nine black youths waited behind bars for trial on charges of raping two white women. Across the Alabama line, white and black hoboes on board got into a fight; some jumped and some were thrown from the train. Alerted by telephone, a sheriff’s posse stopped the train, arrested the nine Negroes still on it, and took them to jail in the Jackson County seat, Scottsboro. Then Victoria Price claimed they had raped her and Ruby Bates. Doctors found no proof of this story, but a frenzied crowd gathered swiftly. Ten thousand people, many armed, were there a week later when the nine went on trial. Because state law provided a death penalty, it required the court to appoint one or two defense lawyers. At the arraignment, the judge told all seven members of the county bar to serve. In three trials, completed in three days, jurors found eight defendants guilty; they could not agree on Roy Wright, one of the youngest. The eight were sentenced to death. Of these nine, the oldest might have reached 21; one was crippled, one nearly blind; each signed his name by “X”-his mark. All swore they were innocent. On appeal, Alabama’s highest court ordered a new hearing for one of the nine, Eugene Williams; but it upheld the other proceedings. When a petition in the name of Ozie Powell reached the Supreme Court, seven Justices agreed that no lawyer had helped the defendants at the trials. Justice George Sutherland wrote the Court’s opinion. Facing a possible death sentence, unable to hire a lawyer, too young or ignorant or dull to defend himself-such a defendant has a constitutional right to counsel, and his counsel must fight for him, Sutherland said. Sent back for retrial, the cases went on. Alabama reached the Supreme Court in 1935; Chief Justice Hughes ruled that because qualified Negroes did not serve on jury duty in those counties, the trials had been unconstitutional. We still have the right to secede! Retorted one southern official. Again the prisoners stood trial. Alabama dropped rape charges against some; others were conflicted but later paroled; one escaped. The Supreme Court’s rulings stood-if a defendant lacks a lawyer and a fairly chosen jury, the Constitution can help him. The Scottsboro Boys in 1937. And the Constitution forbids any state’s prosecuting attorneys to use evidence they know is false; the Court announced this in 1935, when Tom Mooney had spent nearly 20 years behind the bars of a California prison. To rally support for a stronger Army and Navy, San Franciscans had organized a huge parade for “Preparedness Day, ” July 22, 1916. As the marchers set out, a bomb exploded: 10 victims died, 40 were injured. Mooney, known as a friend of anarchists and a labor radical, was convicted of first-degree murder; soon it appeared that the chief witness against him had lied under oath. President Wilson persuaded the Governor of California to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. For years labor called Mooney a martyr to injustice. Finally Mooney’s lawyers applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, and won a new ruling-if a state uses perjured witnesses, knowing that they lie, it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process of law; it must provide ways to set aside such tainted convictions. The case went back to the state. In 1939 Governor Culbert Olson granted Mooney a pardon; free, he was almost forgotten. When the stock market collapsed in 1929 and the American economy headed toward ruin, President Hoover had called for emergency measures. The states tried to cope with the general disaster. Before long, cases on their new laws began to reach the Supreme Court. Roosevelt won the 1932 Presidential election, and by June 1933, Congress had passed 15 major laws for national remedies. Grocer Leo Nebbia, who violated the New York Milk Control Board’s order to fix prices of milk in order to stabilize the market. Agitator and Martyr for Labor, Tom Mooney leaves San Quentin in 1939. Almost 20,000,000 people depended on federal relief by 1934, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Leo Nebbia. Justice Owen Roberts wrote the majority opinion, upholding the New York law; he went beyond the 1887 decision in the Granger cases to declare that a state may regulate any business whatever when the public good requires it. The “four horsemen” dissented; but Roosevelt’s New Dealers began to hope their economic program might win the Supreme Court’s approval after all. Considering a New Deal law for the first time, in January 1935, the Court held that one part of the National Industrial Recovery Act gave the President too much lawmaking power. The Court did sustain the policy of reducing the dollar’s value in gold. But a five-to-four decision in May made a railroad pension law unconstitutional. Then all nine Justices vetoed a law to relieve farm debtors, and killed the National Recovery Administration; FDR denounced their “horse-and-buggy” definition of interstate commerce. While the Court moved into its splendid new building, criticism of its decisions grew sharper and angrier. The whole federal judiciary came under attack as district courts issued-over a two-year period-some 1,600 injunctions to keep Acts of Congress from being enforced. But the Court seemed to ignore the clamor. Farming lay outside Congressional power, said six Justices in 1936; they called the Agricultural Adjustment Act invalid for dealing with state problems. Brandeis and Cardozo joined Stone in a scathing dissent: Courts are not the only agency. That must be assumed to have capacity to govern. But two decisions that followed denied power to both the federal and the state governments. In a law to strengthen the chaotic soft-coal industry and help the almost starving miners, Congress had dealt with prices in one section, with working conditions and wages in another. If the courts held one section invalid, the other might survive. When a test case came up, seven coal-mining states urged the Court to uphold the Act, but five Justices called the whole law unconstitutional for trying to cure “local evils”-state problems. Then they threw out a New York law that set minimum wages for women and children; they said states could not regulate matters of individual liberty. By forbidding Congress and the states to act, Justice Harlan F. Stone confided bitterly to his sister, the Court had apparently tied Uncle Sam up in a hard knot. Tortured and whipped by deputy sheriffs, three men confessed to murder; in 1936 the Supreme Court found that their state, Mississippi, had denied them due process of law. That November Roosevelt won reelection by a margin of ten million votes; Democrats won more than three-fourths of the seats in Congress. The people had spoken. Yet the laws their representatives passed might stand or fall by five or six votes in the Supreme Court. Roosevelt, aware that Congress had changed the number of Justices six times since 1789, sent a plan for court reform to the Senate on February 5, 1937. Emphasizing the limited vision of “older men, ” Roosevelt asked Congress for power to name an additional Justice when one aged 70 did not resign, until the Court should have 15 members. Six were already over 70; Louis D. Roosevelt said the Court needed help to keep up with its work. Even staunch New Dealers boggled at this plan; it incurred criticism as sharp as any the Court had ever provoked. Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes calmly pointed out that the Court was keeping up with its work. And in angry editorials and thousands of letters to Congress the public protested the very idea of “packing” the Court. This 1937 steel strike occured in Pittsburgh following the Supreme Court’s decision to order union employees fired from their jobs at Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation reinstated. President Roosevelt’s attempt to add more Justices to the Court in 1937 met with defeat. Before the President revealed his plan, five Justices had already voted to sustain a state minimum-wage law in a case from Washington; on March 29, the Court announced that the law was constitutional. On April 12, Chief Justice Hughes read the majority opinion in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. It upheld the Wagner Act, the first federal law to regulate disputes between capital and labor. Hughes gave interstate commerce a definition broader than the Jones & Laughlin domain-mines in Minnesota, quarries in West Virginia, steamships on the Great Lakes. Although the case turned on a union dispute at one plant in Pennsylvania, he said, a company-wide dispute would paralyze interstate commerce. Congress could prevent such evils and protect union rights. Under these two rulings, Congress and the states were free to exercise powers the Court had denied just a year before. Stubbornly the “four horsemen” dissented. But Willis Van Devanter announced that he would retire. By autumn the fight over the Court was a thing of the past. As Lincoln said in 1861, the people would rule themselves; they would decide vital questions of national policy. But, as firmly as Lincoln himself, they disclaimed any assault upon the Court. In one of the Supreme Court’s greatest crises, the people chose to sustain its power and dignity. Decisions changed dramatically in the “constitutional revolutions” of 1937. So did the Court when President Roosevelt made appointments at last. In 1937 he named Senator Hugo L. Black; in 1938, Solicitor General Stanley Reed; in 1939, Felix Frankfurter and William O. New problems tested the Court as it was defining civil liberties. Danger from abroad made the case for patriotism and freedom in America more urgent; in the “blood purge” of 1934, Adolf Hitler had announced, I became the supreme judge of the German people. Under God’s law, the Commandments in the Book of Exodus, members of Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to salute a flag. When Lillian and William Gobitas (misspelled “Gobitis” in the record), aged 12 and 10 in 1935, refused to join classmates in saluting the Stars and Stripes, the Board of Education in Minersville, Pennsylvania, decided to expel them for insubordination. With help from other Jehovah’s Witnesses and the American Civil Liberties Union, their father sought relief in the federal courts. The district court and the circuit court of appeals granted it. In 1940 the school board turned to the Supreme Court. Considering the right of local authorities to settle local problems, eight Justices voted to uphold the school board’s secular regulation. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the majority opinion. He told Justice Stone that his private idea “of liberty and toleration and good sense” favored the Gobitas family, but he believed that judges should defer to the actions of the people’s elected representatives. Hitler’s armies had stabbed into France when Frankfurter announced the Court’s ruling on June 3, 1940; Stone read his dissent with obvious emotion, insisting that the Constitution must preserve freedom of mind and spirit. Law reviews criticized the Court for setting aside the issue of religious freedom. Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered violent attacks around the country; many states expelled children from school for not saluting the flag. In 1940, Attorney General Frank Murphy came to the bench; Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, in 1941. When Hughes retired that year, Roosevelt made Harlan Fiske Stone Chief Justice and gave his seat as Associate to Attorney General Robert H. How the “new Court” would meet old problems soon became clear. Charles Evans Hughes was born and raised in New York. He was educated by his parents but matriculated at Madison College (now Colgate) when he was fourteen. He completed his undergraduate education at Brown. Hughes taught briefly before entering Columbia Law School. He scored an amazing 99 1/2 on his bar exam at the age of 22. He practiced law in New York for 20 years, though he did hold an appointment at Cornell Law School for a few years in that period. With an endorsement from Theodore Roosevelt, Hughes ran successfully for New York governor, defeating Democrat William Randolph Hearst in 1906. In 1910, Hughes accepted nomination to the High Court from President Taft. Six years later, Hughes resigned to run against Woodrow Wilson for the presidency as the nominee of the Republican and Progressive Parties. He lost by a mere 23 electoral votes. After a brief stint in private practice, Hughes was called to politics again, this time as secretary of state for Warren G. Hughes continued in this role during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Hughes’s nomination to be chief justice met with opposition from Democrats who viewed Hughes as too closely aligned with corporate America. Their opposition was insufficient to deny Hughes the center chair, however. Hughes authored twice as many constitutional opinions as any other member of his Court. His opinions, in the view of one commentator, were concise and admirable, placing Hughes in the pantheon of great justices. Hughes had remarkable intellectual and social gifts that made him a superb leader and administrator. He had a photographic memory that few, if any, of his colleagues could match. Yet he was generous, kind, and forebearing in an institution where egos generally come in only one size: extra large! The chief justice of the United States[1][2] is the chief judge of the Supreme Court of the United States and the highest-ranking officer of the U. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U. Constitution grants plenary power to the president of the United States to nominate, and with the advice and consent of the United States Senate, appoint “Judges of the supreme Court”, who serve until they resign, retire, are impeached and convicted, or die. The existence of a chief justice is explicit in Article One, Section 3, Clause 6 which states that the chief justice shall preside on the impeachment trial of the president. The chief justice has significant influence in the selection of cases for review, presides when oral arguments are held, and leads the discussion of cases among the justices. Additionally, when the court renders an opinion, the chief justice, if in the majority, chooses who writes the court’s opinion. When deciding a case, however, the chief justice’s vote counts no more than that of any other justice. Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 designates the chief justice to preside during presidential impeachment trials in the Senate; this has occurred three times. While nowhere mandated, the presidential oath of office is by tradition typically administered by the chief justice. The chief justice serves as a spokesperson for the federal government’s judicial branch and acts as a chief administrative officer for the federal courts. The chief justice presides over the Judicial Conference and, in that capacity, appoints the director and deputy director of the Administrative Office. The chief justice is an ex officio member of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution and, by custom, is elected chancellor of the board. The current chief justice is John Roberts (since 2005). Five of the 17 chief justices-John Rutledge, Edward Douglass White, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan Fiske Stone, and William Rehnquist-served as associate justice prior to becoming chief justice. Origin, title, and appointment. List of chief justices. The United States Constitution does not explicitly establish an office of chief justice but presupposes its existence with a single reference in Article I, Section 3, Clause 6: When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside. Nothing more is said in the Constitution regarding the office. Article III, Section 1, which authorizes the establishment of the Supreme Court, refers to all members of the court simply as “judges”. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the distinctive titles of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1866, Salmon P. Chase assumed the title of Chief Justice of the United States, and Congress began using the new title in subsequent legislation. [2] The first person whose Supreme Court commission contained the modified title was Melville Fuller in 1888. [3] The associate justice title was not altered in 1866 and remains as originally created. The chief justice, like all federal judges, is nominated by the president and confirmed to office by the U. Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution specifies that they shall hold their Offices during good Behavior. This language means that the appointments are effectively for life and that once in office, a justice’s tenure ends only when the justice dies, retires, resigns, or is removed from office through the impeachment process. Since 1789, 15 presidents have made a total of 22 official nominations to the position. [5] The practice of appointing an individual to serve as chief justice is grounded in tradition; while the Constitution mandates that there be a chief justice, it is silent on the subject of how one is chosen and by whom. There is no specific constitutional prohibition against using another method to select the chief justice from among those justices properly appointed and confirmed to the Supreme Court. Three incumbent associate justices have been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate as chief justice: Edward Douglass White in 1910, Harlan Fiske Stone in 1941, and William Rehnquist in 1986. A fourth, Abe Fortas, was nominated to the position in 1968 but was not confirmed. As an associate justice does not have to resign his or her seat on the court in order to be nominated as chief justice, Fortas remained an associate justice. Similarly, when Associate Justice William Cushing was nominated and confirmed as chief justice in January 1796 but declined the office, he too remained on the court. John Rutledge was the first. President Washington gave him a recess appointment in 1795. However, his subsequent nomination to the office was not confirmed by the Senate, and he left office and the court. In 1930, former Associate Justice Charles Evans Hughes was confirmed as chief justice. Additionally, in December 1800, former Chief Justice John Jay was nominated and confirmed to the position a second time but ultimately declined it, opening the way for the appointment of John Marshall. Article I, Section 3 of the U. Constitution stipulates that the chief justice shall preside over the Senate trial of an impeached president of the United States. Three chief justices have presided over presidential impeachment trials: Salmon P. Chase (1868 trial of Andrew Johnson), William Rehnquist (1999 trial of Bill Clinton), and John Roberts (2020 trial of Donald Trump). All three presidents were acquitted in the Senate. Although the Constitution is silent on the matter, the chief justice would, under Senate rules adopted in 1999 prior to the Clinton trial, preside over the trial of an impeached vice president. [6][7] This rule was established to preclude the possibility of a vice president presiding over their own trial. Many of the court’s procedures and inner workings are governed by the rules of protocol based on the seniority of the justices. The chief justice always ranks first in the order of precedence-regardless of the length of the officeholder’s service (even if shorter than that of one or more associate justices). This elevated status has enabled successive chief justices to define and refine both the court’s culture and its judicial priorities. The chief justice sets the agenda for the weekly meetings where the justices review the petitions for certiorari, to decide whether to hear or deny each case. The Supreme Court agrees to hear less than one percent of the cases petitioned to it. While associate justices may append items to the weekly agenda, in practice this initial agenda-setting power of the chief justice has significant influence over the direction of the court. Nonetheless, a chief justice’s influence may be limited by circumstances and the associate justices’ understanding of legal principles; it is definitely limited by the fact that he has only a single vote of nine on the decision whether to grant or deny certiorari. Despite the chief justice’s elevated stature, his vote carries the same legal weight as the vote of each associate justice. Additionally, he has no legal authority to overrule the verdicts or interpretations of the other eight judges or tamper with them. [8] The task of assigning who shall write the opinion for the majority falls to the most senior justice in the majority. Thus, when the chief justice is in the majority, he always assigns the opinion. [10] Early in his tenure, Chief Justice John Marshall insisted upon holdings which the justices could unanimously back as a means to establish and build the court’s national prestige. In doing so, Marshall would often write the opinions himself and actively discouraged dissenting opinions. Associate Justice William Johnson eventually persuaded Marshall and the rest of the court to adopt its present practice: one justice writes an opinion for the majority, and the rest are free to write their own separate opinions or not, whether concurring or dissenting. The chief justice’s formal prerogative-when in the majority-to assign which justice will write the court’s opinion is perhaps his most influential power, [9] as this enables him to influence the historical record. [8] He may assign this task to the individual justice best able to hold together a fragile coalition, to an ideologically amenable colleague, or to himself. Opinion authors can have a large influence on the content of an opinion; two justices in the same majority, given the opportunity, might write very different majority opinions. [9] A chief justice who knows the associate justices well can therefore do much-by the simple act of selecting the justice who writes the opinion of the court-to affect the general character or tone of an opinion, which in turn can affect the interpretation of that opinion in cases before lower courts in the years to come. The chief justice chairs the conferences where cases are discussed and tentatively voted on by the justices. He normally speaks first and so has influence in framing the discussion. Although the chief justice votes first-the court votes in order of seniority-he may strategically pass in order to ensure membership in the majority if desired. [9] It is reported that. Chief Justice Warren Burger was renowned, and even vilified in some quarters, for voting strategically during conference discussions on the Supreme Court in order to control the Court’s agenda through opinion assignment. Indeed, Burger is said to have often changed votes to join the majority coalition, cast “phony votes” by voting against his preferred position, and declined to express a position at conference. The chief justice has traditionally administered the presidential oath of office to new U. This is merely custom, and is not a constitutional responsibility of the chief justice. The Constitution does not require that the presidential oath be administered by anyone in particular, simply that it be taken by the president. Law empowers any federal or state judge, as well as notaries public, to administer oaths and affirmations. The chief justice ordinarily administers the oath of office to newly appointed and confirmed associate justices, whereas the seniormost associate justice will normally swear in a new chief justice. If the chief justice is ill or incapacitated, the oath is usually administered by the seniormost member of the Supreme Court. Seven times, someone other than the chief justice of the United States administered the oath of office to the president. [13] Robert Livingston, as chancellor of the state of New York (the state’s highest ranking judicial office), administered the oath of office to George Washington at his first inauguration; there was no chief justice of the United States, nor any other federal judge prior to their appointments by President Washington in the months following his inauguration. William Cushing, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, administered Washington’s second oath of office in 1793. Calvin Coolidge’s father, a notary public, administered the oath to his son after the death of Warren Harding. [14] This, however, was contested upon Coolidge’s return to Washington, and his oath was re-administered by Judge Adolph A. District Court for the District of Columbia. [15] John Tyler and Millard Fillmore were both sworn in on the death of their predecessors by Chief Judge William Cranch of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. Arthur and Theodore Roosevelt’s initial oaths reflected the unexpected nature of their taking office. On November 22, 1963, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, a federal district court judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, administered the oath of office to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson aboard the presidential airplane. Since the tenure of William Howard Taft, the office of chief justice has moved beyond just first among equals. [17] The chief justice also. Serves as the head of the federal judiciary. Serves as the head of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the chief administrative body of the United States federal courts. The Judicial Conference is empowered by the Rules Enabling Act to propose rules, which are then promulgated by the Supreme Court (subject to disapproval by Congress under the Congressional Review Act), to ensure the smooth operation of the federal courts. Major portions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Federal Rules of Evidence have been adopted by most state legislatures and are considered canonical by American law schools. Appoints sitting federal judges to the membership of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a “secret court” which oversees requests for surveillance warrants by federal police agencies (primarily the FBI) against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States. Appoints sitting federal judges to the membership of the United States Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a special court constituted to determine whether aliens should be deported from the United States on the grounds that they are terrorists. Appoints the members of the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, a special tribunal of seven sitting federal judges responsible for selecting the venue for coordinated pretrial proceedings in situations where multiple related federal actions have been filed in different judicial districts. Serves as an ex officio member of the Board of Regents and as the chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution. Supervises the acquisition of books for the Law Library of the Library of Congress. Unlike Senators and Representatives, who are constitutionally prohibited from holding any other “office of trust or profit” of the United States or of any state while holding their congressional seats, the chief justice and the other members of the federal judiciary are not barred from serving in other positions. John Jay served as a diplomat to negotiate the Jay Treaty, Robert H. Jackson was appointed by President Truman to be the U. Prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis, and Earl Warren chaired the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. [20] Currently, Clarence Thomas is the most senior associate justice. Since the Supreme Court was established in 1789, the following 17 men have served as chief justice:[21][22]. 5 years, 253 days. United States Secretary of State. John Rutledge color painting. August 12, 1795[d]. (Resigned, nomination having been rejected). Chief Justice of the. South Carolina Court of. Common Pleas and Sessions. Of the Supreme Court. 4 years, 282 days. 34 years, 152 days. 28 years, 198 days. 8 years, 143 days. 14 years, 19 days. 21 years, 269 days. Illinois State Bar Association. December 12, 1910[e]. 10 years, 151 days. 8 years, 207 days. President of the United States. 11 years, 126 days. June 27, 1941[e]. 4 years, 293 days. 7 years, 76 days. October 5, 1953[d]. 15 years, 261 days. 17 years, 95 days. United States Court of Appeals. For the District of Columbia Circuit. September 17, 1986[e]. 18 years, 342 days. 15 years, 270 days. (April 11, 1862 – August 27, 1948) was an American statesman, politician and jurist who served as the 11th Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. A member of the Republican Party, he was also the 36th Governor of New York, the Republican nominee for president of the United States in the 1916 presidential election, and the 44th United States Secretary of State. Born to a Welsh immigrant preacher and his wife in Glens Falls, New York, Hughes graduated from Brown University and Columbia Law School and practiced law in New York City. He won election as the Governor of New York in 1906, and implemented several progressive reforms. In 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed Hughes as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. During his tenure on the Supreme Court, Hughes often joined Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In voting to uphold state and federal regulations. Hughes served as an Associate Justice until 1916, when he resigned from the bench to accept the Republican presidential nomination. Though Hughes was widely viewed as the favorite in the race against incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, Wilson won a narrow victory. Harding won the 1920 presidential election, Hughes accepted Harding’s invitation to serve as Secretary of State. Serving under Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he negotiated the Washington Naval Treaty, which was designed to prevent a naval arms race among the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover appointed him to succeed Chief Justice Taft. Along with Associate Justice Owen Roberts, Hughes emerged as a key swing vote on the bench, positioned between the liberal Three Musketeers and the conservative Four Horsemen. The Hughes Court struck down several New Deal programs in the early and the mid-1930s, but 1937 marked a turning point for the Supreme Court and the New Deal as Hughes and Roberts joined with the Three Musketeers to uphold the Wagner Act and a state minimum wage law. That same year saw the defeat of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have expanded the size of the Supreme Court. Hughes served until 1941, when he retired and was succeeded by Associate Justice Harlan F. Early life and family. Legal and academic career. Governor of New York. Return to private practice. Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. Hughes at the age of 16. Hughes’s father, David Charles Hughes, immigrated to the United States from Wales in 1855 after he was inspired by The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. David became a Baptist preacher in Glens Falls, New York, and married Mary Catherine Connelly, whose family had been in the United States for several generations. [2] Charles Evans Hughes, the only child of David and Mary, was born in Glens Falls on April 11, 1862. [3][4] The Hughes family moved to Oswego, New York, in 1866, but relocated soon after to Newark, New Jersey, and then to Brooklyn. With the exception of a brief period of attendance at Newark High School, Hughes received no formal education until 1874, instead being educated by his parents. In September 1874, he enrolled in New York City’s prestigious Public School 35, graduating the following year. At the age of 14, Hughes attended Madison University (now Colgate University) for two years before transferring to Brown University. He graduated from Brown third in his class at the age of 19, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He was also a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity, where he would serve as the first international President later on. [6] During his time at Brown, Hughes volunteered for the successful presidential campaign of Republican nominee James A. Garfield, a brother of his in Delta Upsilon where Garfield was an undergraduate at Williams College, and served as the editor of the college newspaper. After graduating from Brown, Hughes spent a year working as a teacher in Delhi, New York. [7] He next enrolled in Columbia Law School, where he graduated first in his class in 1884. [6] That same year, he passed the New York bar exam with the highest score ever awarded by the state. In 1888, Hughes married Antoinette Carter, the daughter of the senior partner of the law firm where he worked. Their first child, Charles Evans Hughes Jr. [9] Hughes and his wife would have one son and three daughters. [10] Their youngest child, Elizabeth Hughes, was one of the first humans injected with insulin, and later served as president of the Supreme Court Historical Society. Hughes with his wife and children, c. ? Hughes took a position with the Wall Street law firm of Chamberlain, Carter & Hornblower in 1883, focusing primarily on matters related to contracts and bankruptcies. He was made a partner in the firm in 1888, and the firm changed its name to Carter, Hughes & Cravath (it later became known as Hughes Hubbard & Reed). Hughes left the firm and became a professor at Cornell Law School from 1891 to 1893. [12] He also joined the board of Brown University and served on a special committee that recommended revisions to New York’s Code of Civil Procedure. Responding to newspaper stories run by the New York World, Governor Frank W. Higgins appointed a legislative committee to investigate the state’s public utilities in 1905. On the recommendation of a former state judge who had been impressed by Hughes’s performance in court, the legislative committee appointed Hughes to lead the investigation. Hughes was reluctant to take on the powerful utility companies, but Senator Frederick C. Stevens, the leader of the committee, convinced Hughes to accept the position. Hughes decided to center his investigation on Consolidated Gas, which controlled the production and sale of gas in New York City. To eliminate or mitigate those abuses, Hughes drafted and convinced the state legislature to pass bills that established a commission to regulate public utilities and lowered gas prices. Seeking to remove Hughes from the investigation, Republican leaders nominated him as the party’s candidate for Mayor of New York City, but Hughes refused the nomination. Gubernatorial portrait of Charles Evans Hughes. Seeking a strong candidate to defeat newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst in the 1906 New York gubernatorial election, President Theodore Roosevelt convinced New York Republican leaders to nominate Hughes for governor. Roosevelt described Hughes as a sane and sincere reformer, who really has fought against the very evils which Hearst denounces… [but is] free from any taint of demagogy. [18] In his campaign for governor, Hughes attacked the corruption of specific companies but defended corporations as a necessary part of the economy. He also called for an eight-hour workday on public works projects and favored prohibitions on child labor. [19] Hughes was not a charismatic speaker, but he campaigned vigorously throughout the state and won the endorsements of most newspapers. [20] Ultimately, Hughes defeated Hearst in a close election, taking 52 percent of the vote. Hughes’s governorship focused largely on reforming the government and addressing political corruption. He expanded the number of civil service positions, increased the power of the public utility regulatory commissions, and won passage of laws that placed limits on political donations by corporations and required political candidates to track campaign receipts and expenditures. [21] He also signed laws that barred younger workers from several dangerous occupations and established a maximum 48-hour workweek for manufacturing workers under the age of 16. To enforce those laws, Hughes reorganized the New York State Department of Labor. Hughes’s labor policies were influenced by economist Richard T. Ely, who sought to improve working conditions for laborers, but rejected the more far-reaching reforms favored by union leaders like Samuel Gompers. Despite his busyness as New York governor, Hughes found time to get involved in religious matters. A lifelong Baptist, he participated in the creation of the Northern Baptist Convention in May 1907. Hughes served the convention as its first president, beginning the task of unifying the thousands of independent Baptist churches across the North into one denomination. Previously, northern Baptists had only connected between local churches through missions societies and benevolent causes. The Northern Baptist Convention would go on to become the historical important American Baptist Churches USA, which made this aspect of Hughes’ life during his governorship a key part of his historical influence. However, Hughes’ political role was changing. He had previously been close with Roosevelt, but relations between Hughes and the president cooled after a dispute over a minor federal appointment. [25] Roosevelt chose not to seek re-election in 1908, instead endorsing Secretary of War William Howard Taft as his preferred successor. Taft won the Republican presidential nomination and asked Hughes to serve as his running mate, but Hughes declined the offer. Hughes also considered retiring from the governorship, but Taft and Roosevelt convinced him to seek a second term. Despite having little support among some of the more conservative leaders of the state party, Hughes won re-election in the 1908 election. Hughes’s second term proved to be less successful than his first, but he increased regulation over telephone and telegraph companies and won passage of the first workers’ compensation bill in U. See also: White Court (judges). Hughes struck up a close friendship with Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. By early 1910, Hughes was anxious to retire from his position as governor. [27] A vacancy on the Supreme Court arose following the death of Associate Justice David J. Brewer, and Taft offered the position to Hughes. Hughes quickly accepted the offer, and he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on May 2, 1910. [27] Two months after Hughes’ confirmation, but prior to his taking the judicial oath, Chief Justice Melville Fuller died. Taft elevated Associate Justice Edward Douglass White to the position of Chief Justice despite having previously indicated to Hughes that he might select Hughes as Chief Justice. White’s candidacy for the position was bolstered by his long experience on the bench and popularity among his fellow justices, as well as Theodore Roosevelt’s coolness towards Hughes. Taft nominated Willis Van Devanter to succeed White as associate justice. Hughes, who was sworn into office on October 10, 1910, [1] quickly struck up friendships with other members of the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice White, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, and Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. [29] In the disposition of cases, however, Hughes tended to align with Holmes. He voted to uphold state laws providing for minimum wages, workmen’s compensation, and maximum work hours for women and children. [30] He also wrote several opinions upholding the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause. His majority opinion in Baltimore & Ohio Railroad vs. Interstate Commerce Commission upheld the right of the federal government to regulate the hours of railroad workers. [31] His majority opinion in the 1914 Shreveport Rate Case upheld the Interstate Commerce Commission’s decision to void discriminatory railroad rates imposed by the Railroad Commission of Texas. The decision established that the federal government could regulate intrastate commerce when it affected interstate commerce, though Hughes avoided directly overruling the 1895 case of United States v. He also wrote a series of opinions that upheld civil liberties; in one such case, McCabe v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Co. Hughes’s majority opinion required railroad carriers to give African-Americans equal treatment. [33] Hughes’s majority opinion in Bailey v. Alabama invalidated a state law that had made it a crime for a laborer to fail to complete obligations agreed to in a labor contract. Hughes held that this law violated the Thirteenth Amendment and discriminated against African-American workers. [31] He also joined the majority decision in the 1915 case of Guinn v. United States, which outlawed the use of grandfather clauses to determine voter enfranchisement. [34] Hughes and Holmes were the only dissenters from the court’s ruling that affirmed a lower court’s decision to withhold a writ of habeas corpus from Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager convicted of murder in the state of Georgia. Further information: 1916 United States presidential election. Hughes in Winona, Minnesota, during the 1916 presidential campaign campaigning on the Olympian. Taft and Roosevelt endured a bitter split during Taft’s presidency, and Roosevelt challenged Taft for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination. Taft won re-nomination, but Roosevelt ran on the ticket of a third party, the Progressive Party. [36] With the split in the Republican Party, Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson defeated Taft and Roosevelt in the 1912 presidential election and enacted his progressive New Freedom agenda. [37] Seeking to bridge the divide in the Republican Party and limit Wilson to a single term, several Republican leaders asked Hughes to consider running in the 1916 presidential election. Hughes at first rebuffed those entreaties, but his potential candidacy became the subject of widespread speculation and polls showed that he was the preferred candidate of many Republican voters. By the time of the June 1916 Republican National Convention, Hughes had won two presidential primaries, and his backers had lined up the support of numerous delegates. Hughes led on the first presidential ballot of the convention and clinched the nomination on the third ballot. Hughes accepted the nomination, becoming the first and only sitting Supreme Court Justice to serve as a major party’s presidential nominee, and submitted his resignation to President Wilson. Roosevelt, meanwhile, declined to run again on a third party ticket, leaving Hughes and Wilson as the only major candidates in the race. 1916 electoral vote results. Because of the Republican Party’s dominance in presidential elections held since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Hughes was widely regarded as the favorite even though Wilson was the incumbent. His candidacy was further boosted by his own reputation for intelligence, personal integrity, and moderation. Hughes also won the public support of both Taft and Roosevelt, though Roosevelt remained uneasy with Hughes, whom he feared would be a Wilson with whiskers. However, the split in Republican ranks remained a lingering issue, and Hughes damaged his campaign by inadvertently snubbing Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California who had been Roosevelt’s running mate in the 1912 election. [39] Because of Hughes’s opposition to the Adamson Act and the Sixteenth Amendment, most former Progressive Party leaders endorsed Wilson. [40] By election day, Hughes was still generally considered to be the favorite. However, Wilson swept the Solid South and won several victories in the Midwest, where his candidacy was boosted by a strong pacifist sentiment. Wilson ultimately prevailed after winning the state of California by fewer than 4,000 votes. The next month, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, and the United States entered World War I. [43] Hughes supported Wilson’s military policies, including the imposition of the draft, and he served as chairman of New York City’s draft appeals board. He also investigated the aircraft industry on behalf of the Wilson administration, exposing numerous inefficiencies. [45] He sought to broker a compromise between President Wilson and Senate Republicans regarding US entrance into Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, but the Senate rejected the League and the Treaty of Versailles. With Wilson’s popularity declining, many Republican leaders believed that their party would win the 1920 presidential election. Hughes remained popular in the party, and many influential Republicans favored him as the party’s candidate in 1920. Hughes was struck by personal disaster when his daughter, Helen, died in 1920 of tuberculosis, and he refused to allow his name to be considered for the presidential nomination at the 1920 Republican National Convention. The party instead nominated a ticket consisting of Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio and Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. [47] The Republican ticket won in a landslide, taking 61 percent of the popular vote. Further information: Presidency of Warren G. Harding and Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Hughes’s residence in 1921. Shortly after Harding’s victory in the 1920 election, Hughes accepted the position of Secretary of State. [48] After the death of Chief Justice White in May 1921, Hughes was mentioned as a potential successor. Hughes told Harding he was uninterested in leaving the State Department, and Harding instead appointed former President Taft as the Chief Justice. Harding granted Hughes a great deal of discretion in his leadership of the State Department and US foreign policy. [50] Harding and Hughes frequently communicated, Hughes worked within some broad outlines, and the president remained well-informed. But the president rarely overrode any of Hughes’s decisions, with the big and obvious exception of the League of Nations. After taking office, Pres. Harding hardened his stance on the League of Nations, deciding the US would not join even a scaled-down version. [52] Or, another view is that Harding favored joining with reservations when he assumed office on March 4, 1921, but that Senators staunchly opposed (the “Irreconcilables”), per Ron Powaski’s 1991 book, threatened to wreck the new administration. Hughes favored membership in the League. Early in his tenure as Secretary of State, he asked the Senate to vote on the Treaty of Versailles, [54] but he yielded to either Harding’s changing views and/or political reality within the Senate. Instead, he convinced Harding of the necessity of a separate treaty with Germany, resulting in the signing and eventual ratification of the U. [55] Hughes also favored US entrance into the Permanent Court of International Justice, but was unable to convince the Senate to provide support. Hughes’s major initiative in office was naval disarmament, as he sought to prevent a naval arms race among the three great naval powers of Britain, Japan, and the United States. After Senator William Borah led passage of a resolution calling on the Harding administration to negotiate an arms reduction treaty with Japan and Britain, Hughes convinced those countries as well as Italy and France to attend a naval conference in Washington. Hughes selected an American delegation consisting of himself, former Secretary of State Elihu Root, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Democratic Senator Oscar Underwood. Hughes hoped that the selection of Underwood would ensure bipartisan support for any treaty arising from the conference. Prior to the conference, Hughes had carefully considered possible treaty terms since each side would seek terms that would provide their respective navy with subtle advantages. Knowing that US and foreign naval leaders would resist his proposal, he anxiously guarded it from the press, but he won the support of Root, Lodge, and Underwood. The Washington Naval Conference opened in November 1921, attended by five national delegations, and, in the gallery, hundreds of reporters and dignitaries such as Chief Justice Taft and William Jennings Bryan. On the first day of the conference, Hughes unveiled his proposal to limit naval armaments. [58] The British delegation, led by Arthur Balfour, supported the proposal, but the Japanese delegation, under the leadership of Kato Tomosaburo, asked for several modifications. Kato asked that the ratio be adjusted to 10:10:7 and refused to destroy the Mutsu, a dreadnought that many Japanese saw as a symbol of national pride. Kato eventually relented on the naval ratios, but Hughes acquiesced to the retention of the Mutsu, leading to protests from British leaders. Hughes clinched an agreement after convincing Balfour to agree to limit the size of the Admiral-class battlecruisers despite objections from the British navy. Hughes also won agreement on the Four-Power Treaty, which called for a peaceful resolution of territorial claims in the Pacific Ocean, as well as the Nine-Power Treaty, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of China. News of the success of the conference was warmly received around the world. Roosevelt would later write that the conference brought to the world the first important voluntary agreement for limitation and reduction of armament. See also: Banana Wars. Hughes (fourth from right) leads a delegation to Brazil with Carl Theodore Vogelgesang in 1922. In the aftermath of World War I, the German economy struggled from the strain of postwar rebuilding and war reparations owed to the Entente, while the Entente powers in turn owed large war debts to the United States. Though many economists favored cancellation of all European war debts, French leaders were unwilling to cancel the reparations, and Congress refused to consider forgiving the war debts. Hughes helped organize the creation of an international committee of economists to study the possibility of lowering Germany’s reparations, and Hughes selected Charles G. Dawes to lead that committee. The resulting Dawes Plan, which provided for annual payments by Germany, was accepted at a 1924 conference held in London. Hughes sought better relations with the countries of Latin America, and he favored removing US troops when he believed that doing so was practicable. He formulated plans for the withdrawal of US soldiers from the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua but decided that instability in Haiti required the continued presence of U. He also settled a border dispute between Panama and Costa Rica by threatening to send soldiers into Panama. Hughes was the keynote speaker at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching. Time cover, December 29, 1924. Hughes stayed on as Secretary of State in the Coolidge administration after the death of Harding in 1923, but he left office in early 1925. He also served as a special master in a case concerning Chicago’s sewage system, was elected president of the American Bar Association, and co-founded the National Conference on Christians and Jews. State party leaders asked him to run against Al Smith in New York’s 1926 gubernatorial election, and some national party leaders suggested that he run for president in 1928, but Hughes declined to seek public office. After the 1928 Republican National Convention nominated Herbert Hoover, Hughes gave Hoover his full support and campaigned for him across the United States. Hoover won the election in a landslide and asked Hughes to serve as his Secretary of State, but Hughes declined the offer to keep his commitment to serve as a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice. See also: Hughes Court, List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Hughes Court, and Herbert Hoover Supreme Court candidates. Portrait of Hughes as Chief Justice. On February 3, 1930, President Hoover nominated Hughes to succeed Chief Justice Taft, who was gravely ill. Though many had expected Hoover to elevate his close friend, Associate Justice Harlan Stone, Hughes was the top choice of Taft and Attorney General William D. [64][65] Though Hughes had compiled a progressive record during his tenure as an Associate Justice, by 1930 Taft believed that Hughes would be a consistent conservative on the court. [66] The nomination faced resistance from progressive Republicans such as senators George W. Norris and William E. Borah, who were concerned that Hughes would be overly friendly to big business after working as a corporate lawyer. [67][68] Many of those progressives, as well some Southern states’ rights advocates, were outraged by the Taft Court’s tendency to strike down state and federal legislation on the basis of the doctrine of substantive due process and feared that a Hughes Court would emulate the Taft Court. [69] Adherents of the substantive due process doctrine held that economic regulations such as restrictions on child labor and minimum wages violated freedom of contract, which, they argued, could not be abridged by federal and state laws because of the Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. After a brief but bitter confirmation battle, Hughes was confirmed by the Senate in a 52-26 vote, [71] and took his judicial oath of office on February 24, 1930. [1] Hughes’s son, Charles Jr. Was subsequently forced to resign as Solicitor General after his father took office as Chief Justice. [72] Hughes quickly emerged as a leader of the Court, earning the admiration of his fellow justices for his intelligence, energy, and strong understanding of the law. [73] Shortly after Hughes was confirmed, Hoover nominated federal judge John J. Parker to succeed deceased Associate Justice Edward Terry Sanford. The Senate rejected Parker, whose earlier rulings had alienated labor unions and the NAACP, but confirmed Hoover’s second nominee, Owen Roberts. [74] In early 1932, the other justices asked Hughes to request the resignation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose health had declined as he entered his nineties. Hughes privately asked his old friend to retire, and Holmes immediately sent a letter of resignation to President Hoover. To replace Holmes, Hoover nominated Benjamin N. Cardozo, who quickly won confirmation. The early Hughes Court was divided between the conservative “Four Horsemen” and the liberal “Three Musketeers”. [a][77] The primary difference between these two blocs was that the Four Horsemen embraced the substantive due process doctrine, but the liberals, including Louis Brandeis, advocated for judicial restraint, or deference to legislative bodies. [78] Hughes and Roberts would be the swing justices between the two blocs for much of the 1930s. In one of the first major cases of his tenure, Hughes joined with Roberts and the Three Musketeers to strike down a piece of state legislation in the 1931 landmark case of Near v. In his majority opinion, Hughes held that the First Amendment barred states from violating freedom of the press. Hughes also wrote the majority opinion in Stromberg v. California, which represented the first time the Supreme Court struck down a state law on the basis of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. [b][77] In another early case, O’Gorman & Young, Inc. During Hoover’s presidency, the country plunged into the Great Depression. [81] As the country faced an ongoing economic calamity, Franklin D. Roosevelt decisively defeated Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. [82] Responding to the Great Depression, Roosevelt passed a bevy of domestic legislation as part of his New Deal domestic program, and the response to the New Deal became one of the key issues facing the Hughes Court. In the Gold Clause Cases, a series of cases that presented some of the first major tests of New Deal laws, the Hughes Court upheld restrictions on the ownership of gold that were favored by the Roosevelt administration. [83] Roosevelt, who had expected the Supreme Court to rule adversely to his administration’s position, was elated by the outcome, writing that as a lawyer it seems to me that the Supreme Court has at last definitely put human values ahead of the’pound of flesh’ called for by a contract. [84] The Hughes Court also continued to adjudicate major cases concerning the states. In the 1934 case of Home Building & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, Hughes and Roberts joined the Three Musketeers in upholding a Minnesota law that established a moratorium on mortgage payments. [83] Hughes’s majority opinion in that case stated that while an emergency does not create power, an emergency may furnish the occasion for the exercise of power. Beginning with the 1935 case of Railroad Retirement Board v. Roberts started siding with the Four Horsemen, creating a majority bloc that struck down New Deal laws. [86] The court held that Congress had, in passing an act that provided a mandatory retirement and pension system for railroad industry workers, violated due process and exceeded the regulatory powers granted to it by the Commerce Clause. [87] Hughes strongly criticized Roberts’s majority opinion in his dissent, writing that the power committed to Congress to govern interstate commerce does not require that its government should be wise, much less that it be perfect. The power implies a broad discretion. [86] Nonetheless, in May 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down three New Deal laws. Writing the majority opinion in A. United States, Hughes held that Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was doubly unconstitutional, falling afoul of both the Commerce Clause and the nondelegation doctrine. In the 1936 case of United States v. Butler, Hughes surprised many observers by joining with Roberts and the Four Horsemen in striking down the Agricultural Adjustment Act. [88] In doing so, the court dismantled the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the major New Deal agricultural program. [89] In another 1936 case, Carter v. The Supreme Court struck down the Guffey Coal Act, which regulated the bituminous coal industry. Hughes wrote a concurring opinion in Carter in which he agreed with the majority’s holding that Congress could not use its Commerce Clause powers to regulate activities and relations within the states which affect interstate commerce only indirectly. In the final case of the 1936 term, Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, Roberts joined with the Four Horsemen in striking down New York’s minimum wage law. [90] President Roosevelt had held up the New York minimum wage law as a model for other states to follow, and many Republicans as well as Democrats attacked the decision for interfering with the states. [91] In December 1936, the court handed down its near-unanimous opinion in United States v. Upholding a law that granted the president the power to place an arms embargo on Bolivia and Paraguay. Justice Sutherland’s majority opinion, which Hughes joined, explained that the Constitution had granted the president broad powers to conduct foreign policy. The Hughes Court in 1937, photographed by Erich Salomon. Roosevelt won re-election in a landslide in the 1936 presidential election, and congressional Democrats grew their majorities in both houses of Congress. [93] As the Supreme Court had already struck down both the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the president feared that the court would next strike down other key New Deal laws, including the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act) and the Social Security Act. [94] In early 1937, Roosevelt proposed to increase the number of Supreme Court seats through the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 (also known as the “court-packing plan”). Roosevelt argued that the bill was necessary because Supreme Court justices were unable to meet their case load. With large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Roosevelt’s bill had a strong chance of passage in early 1937. [95] However, the bill was poorly received by the public, as many saw the bill as power grab or as an attack on a sacrosanct institution. [96] Hughes worked behind the scenes to defeat the effort, rushing important New Deal legislation through the Supreme Court in an effort to quickly uphold the constitutionality of the laws. [97] He also sent a letter to Senator Burton K. Hughes’s letter had a powerful impact in discrediting Roosevelt’s argument about the practical need for more Supreme Court justices. While the debate over the court-packing plan continued, the Supreme Court upheld, in a 5-4 vote, the state of Washington’s minimum wage law in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. Joined by the Three Musketeers and Roberts, Hughes wrote the majority opinion, [99] which overturned the 1923 case of Adkins v. [100] In his majority opinion, Hughes wrote that the “Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract”, and further held that the Washington legislature was entitled to adopt measures to reduce the evils of the’sweating system,’ the exploiting of workers at wages so low as to be insufficient to meet the bare cost of living. “[101] Because Roberts had previously sided with the four conservative justices in Tipaldo, a similar case, it was widely perceived that Roberts agreed to uphold the constitutionality of minimum wage as a result of the pressure that was put on the Supreme Court by the court-packing plan (a theory referred to as “the switch in time that saved nine). [102] However, Hughes and Roberts would both later indicate that Roberts had committed to changing his judicial stance on state minimum wage law months before Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan. [103] Roberts had voted to grant certiorari to hear the Parrish case even before the 1936 presidential election, and oral arguments for the case had taken place in late 1936. [104] In an initial conference vote held on December 19, 1936, Roberts had voted to uphold the law. [105] Scholars continue to debate why Roberts essentially switched his vote with regards to state minimum wage laws, but Hughes may have played an important role in influencing Roberts to uphold the law. Weeks after the court handed down its decision in Parrish, Hughes wrote for the majority again in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.. Joined by Roberts and the Three Musketeers, Hughes upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act. The Wagner Act case marked a turning point for the Supreme Court, as the court began a pattern of upholding New Deal laws. [107] Later in 1937, the court upheld both the old age benefits and the taxation system established by the Social Security Act. Meanwhile, conservative Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his retirement, undercutting Roosevelt’s arguments for the necessity of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. [108] By the end of the year, the court-packing plan had died in the Senate, and Roosevelt had been dealt a serious political wound that emboldened the conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans. [109] However, throughout 1937, Hughes had presided over a massive shift in jurisprudence that marked the end of the Lochner era, a period during which the Supreme Court had frequently struck down state and federal economic regulations. [100] Hugo Black, Roosevelt’s nominee to succeed Van Devanter, was confirmed by the Senate in August 1937. [110] He was joined by Stanley Forman Reed, who succeeded Sutherland, the following year, leaving pro-New Deal liberals with a majority on the Supreme Court. Associate Justice William O. Douglas served alongside Hughes on the Supreme Court. After 1937, the Hughes Court continued to uphold economic regulations, with McReynolds and Butler often being the lone dissenters. [113] The liberal bloc was strengthened even further in 1940, when Butler was succeeded by another Roosevelt appointee, Frank Murphy. [114] In the case of United States v. Justice Stone’s majority opinion articulated a broad theory of deference to economic regulations. Carolene Products established that the Supreme Court would conduct a “rational basis review” of economic regulations, meaning that the Court would only strike down a regulation if legislators lacked a “rational basis” for passing the regulation. The Supreme Court showed that it would defer to state legislators in the cases of Madden V. Kentucky and Olsen v. [115] Hughes joined the majority in another case, United States v. Which upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The Hughes Court also faced several civil rights cases. Hughes wrote the majority opinion in Missouri ex rel. Canada, which required the state of Missouri to either integrate its law school or establish a separate law school for African-Americans. [117] He joined and helped arrange unanimous support for Black’s majority opinion in Chambers v. Florida, which overturned the conviction of a defendant who had been coerced into confessing a crime. [118] In the 1940 case of Minersville School District v. Gobitis, Hughes joined the majority decision, which held that public schools could require students to salute the American flag despite the students’ religious objections to these practices. Hughes began to consider retiring in 1940, partly due to the declining health of his wife. In June 1941, he informed Roosevelt of his impending retirement. [120] Hughes suggested that Roosevelt elevate Stone to the position of Chief Justice, a suggestion that Roosevelt accepted. [121] Hughes retired in 1941, and Stone was confirmed as the new Chief Justice, beginning the Stone Court. During his retirement, Hughes generally refrained from re-entering public life or giving advice on public policy, but he agreed to review the United Nations Charter for Secretary of State Cordell Hull, [122]and recommending that President Harry S. Truman appoint Fred M. Vinson as Chief Justice after the death of Stone. He lived in New York City with his wife, Antoinette, until she died in December 1945. [123] On August 27, 1948, at the age of 86, Hughes died in what is now the Tiffany Cottage of the Wianno Club in Osterville, Massachusetts. When he died, Hughes was the last living Justice to have served on the White Court. He is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City. In the evaluation of historian Dexter Perkins, in domestic politics. Hughes was a happy mixture of the liberal and the conservative. He was wise enough to know that you cannot preserve a social order unless you eradicate its abuses, and so he was never a stand-patter. On the other side he could see that change carried perils as well as promises. Sometimes he stood out against these perils. He was not always wise, it is true. We do not have to agree with him in everything. But he stands a noble and constructive figure in American life. In the consensus view of scholars, Hughes as a diplomat was. An outstanding Secretary of State. He possessed a clear vision of America’s position in the new international system. The United States would be a world leader, not only in terms of its ability to provide material progress, but also by its advocacy of diplomacy and arbitration over military force. Hughes was fully committed to the supremacy of negotiation and the maintenance of American foreign policy. This quality was combined with an ability to maintain a clear sense of the larger goals of American diplomacy…. He was able to maintain control over US foreign policy and take the country into a new role as a world power. Hughes has been honored in a variety of ways, including in the names of several schools, rooms, and events. Other things named for Hughes include the Hughes Range in Antarctica. On April 11, 1962, the 100th anniversary of Hughes’s birth, the U. Post Office issued a commemorative stamp in his honor. [127] The Charles Evans Hughes House, now the Burmese ambassador’s residence, in Washington, D. Was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1972. Judge Learned Hand once observed that Hughes was the greatest lawyer he had ever known, except that his son Charles Evans Hughes Jr. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Autographs\Historical”. The seller is “memorabilia111″ and is located in this country: US. 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Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed

Supreme Court Signed Check William Day Autograph 1880

supreme
Supreme Court Signed Check William Day Autograph 1880
Supreme Court Signed Check William Day Autograph 1880

Supreme Court Signed Check William Day Autograph 1880
ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT. AN 1880 CHECK FILLED OUT AND SIGNED BY HIM. TORN CORNER AND TOP EDGE. BANK CANCELLATION LEFT SIGNATURE UNAFFECTED. William Rufus Day was an American diplomat and jurist, who served for nineteen years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. William Rufus Day, associate justice of the U. Supreme Court, was born in Ravenna, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1870 and spent the following year in its Department of Law. After settling in Canton, Ohio, in 1872, he began his law practice. He practiced criminal and corporate law in the growing industrial town for 25 years while participating in Republican politics and becoming a close friend of William McKinley. Day was a legal and political adviser to McKinley as the latter won elections to the U. Congress, the governorship of Ohio, and the presidency. Day became McKinley’s first assistant secretary of state on April 23, 1897. Senate, but Sherman was ineffective in that position. Thus, with no diplomatic experience, Day was the defacto secretary and the secretary of state for 20 months during the Spanish-American War. His final diplomatic effort was to lead the U. Peace commission in Paris and sign the peace protocol and Treaty of Paris. Soon after Day’s return from Europe, and despite his hope to return to private life, in February 1899 McKinley appointed Day to the U. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. Roosevelt nominated Day in January 1903 to fill a vacancy on the U. Day sat on the Supreme Court for almost 20 years during an era when the Court made numerous decisions that increased the involvement and police powers of both the federal and state governments in the economy. Day wrote 439 opinions during his tenure on the court, and only 18 were dissents. Characterized as rigid and formalistic, and best known for his Hammer v. Dagenhart (1917) ruling, Day advanced state regulatory powers and the enforcement of antitrust laws – the only federal economic police power that Day consistently supported. Day distrusted large corporations and voted with antitrust majorities throughout his time on the court. He sided with the government in the Standard Oil, American Tobacco, and Union Pacific cases in 1911 and 1912 and again in the Southern Pacific case in 1922. Day believed that Congress could regulate commerce but that constitutional power did not extend to the supervision of production. Day accepted the logic of the U. Knight decision (1895) that developed the distinction between commerce and production in the enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act. That case grew out of the Federal Child Labor Act of 1916, which prohibited interstate transportation of products manufactured in factories that employed children under the age of 14, or children between 14 and 16 working more than eight hours a day or six days a week. Day was consistent in his belief that the commerce clause could not include regulation of production, even though the products would be transported over state borders. Day was more comfortable with state regulation of social ills. His rulings in cases of state government intervention affirmed his belief that states could regulate economic power and social problems within individual state boundaries. New York (1905), Day voted with the minority to limit work in bakeries to 10 hours a day. Day wrote the dissent in Coppage v. Kansas (1915), in which he upheld the constitutionality of the state law to outlaw yellow-dog contracts. Later, in 1921, he asserted the right of a state to regulate drug use in Minnesota ex rel. For Day there was a constitutional limit on federal police powers that did not exist for state governments. Day retired from the Supreme Court in October 1922 and died on Mackinac Island, Michigan. William Day was born in Ohio on April 17, 1849. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan, Day spent an additional year there learning law. After serving as an advisor to then-Gov. William McKinley of Ohio, Day served as assistant secretary of state and then as Secretary of State to President McKinley during the pivotal year of 1898, when McKinley was drawn by jingoistic elements in his party to war with Spain (the Spanish-American War of 1898). As Secretary of State Day signed a protocol for a ceasefire with the French ambassador, who was acting in behalf of Spain. Day then resigned as Secretary of State to become one of the negotiators of the terms between the United States and Spain. In 1899, Day was nominated by McKinley to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which encompasses Ohio. He remained on the Court until the retirement of George Shiras, Jr. Of Pennsylvania on February 23, 1903. President Teddy Roosevelt quickly nominated Day to replace Shiras, in part to placate Ohio Republicans. Day took office on March 2, 1903, and remained on the Court for 19 years. Day was a moderate on a Court that constitutionalized freedom of contract in Lochner v. New York and other cases. Day dissented in Lochner and in Coppage v. Kansas (1915), which unconstitutional Kansas’s law prohibiting the use of yellow-dog provisions in labor contracts. A yellow-dog provision barred an employee from joining a union while employed by the employer. Kansas had barred the inclusion of such provisions in labor contracts, which the Court held violated freedom of contract as interpreted in Lochner. Day also concluded that laws segregating blacks and whites were unconstitutional. On the other hand, Day wrote the Court’s opinion in Hammer v. Dagenhart, which held unconstitutional the Federal Child Labor Act as beyond Congress’s interstate commerce power. In other interstate commerce cases, Day generally permitted federal regulation. Day retired in late 1922. He died on July 9, 1923, at 74. Term of Appointment: 04/26/1898 to 09/16/1898. Born in Ravenna, Ohio, April 17,1849. Graduated from the University of Michigan in 1870. Admitted to the bar in 1872 and commenced practice in Canton, Ohio. Married Mary Elizabeth Schaefer in 1873. Appointed United States Judge for the Northern District of Ohio in 1889, but because of ill health resigned before taking office. As Secretary of State, secured the neutrality of the nations of western Europe in the Spanish-American War and signed the protocol of 1898 for the cessation of hostilities. Chairman of the United States Commission that negotiated and signed the treaty of peace of 1898 with Spain. Died at his summer home on Mackinac Island. Michigan, July 9, 1923. The ambition of William R. Day was to spend his life as a successful practicing attorney in Canton, Ohio. Instead, because of his loyalty to his personal friend William McKinley, he served as Secretary of State during the Spanish-American War, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit for four years, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court for 19 years. William Rufus Day was born in Ohio April 17, 1849. His father, Luther Day, became Chief Justice of Ohio. Day studied law at the University of Michigan, where he had received his bachelor’s degree. He spent a quarter of a century as a satisfied and successful attorney at Canton, resigning after serving for six months as Common Pleas Judge and refusing to accept an appointment as United States District Judge. In 1897 President McKinley appointed him First Assistant Secretary of State and later Secretary of State. He resigned to head the American delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris. In February, 1899, President McKinley appointed him Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, where he served with Judges William Howard Taft and Horace H. With the appointment of Judge Day, the Court for the first time had a full complement of three circuit judges. Following the assassination of President McKinley, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 appointed Justice Day to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served until his retirement in 1922. One of his most celebrated opinions was his dissent in United States v. United States Steel Corporation, 251 U. He had the dubious distinction of writing the majority opinion in Hammer v. 251 (1918), holding unconstitutional the Child Labor Act of 1916. This decision was overruled by United States v. William Rufus Day (April 17, 1849 – July 9, 1923) was an American diplomat and jurist, who served for nineteen years as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Prior to his service on the Supreme Court, Day served as the 36th United States Secretary of State during the administration of President William McKinley and also served as a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the United States Circuit Courts for the Sixth Circuit. Court of Appeals and Circuit Courts service. Selected opinions authored by Day. Day was born in Ravenna, Ohio, [1] one of the children of Emily (Spaulding) Day and Judge Luther Day of the Ohio Supreme Court. [2] He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan in 1870, [1] spent a year studying law with attorney and judge George F. Robinson, [3] and then a year at the University of Michigan Law School. [1] He was admitted to the bar in 1872 and settled in Canton, Ohio, where he began practicing law[1] in partnership with William A. [2] For twenty-five years, Day worked as a criminal defense and corporate lawyer in the growing industrial town while participating in Republican politics. During these years, Day became a good friend of William McKinley. [2] Day became McKinley’s legal and political adviser during McKinley’s candidacies for the Congress, the Governorship of Ohio, and the Presidency of the United States. [2] After he won the Presidency, McKinley appointed Day to be Assistant Secretary of State under Secretary of State John Sherman. [1] Sherman was considered to be ineffective because of declining health and failing memory, [2] and in 1898, President McKinley replaced Sherman with Day. Five months later, Day vacated his cabinet position to helm the United States Peace Commission formed to negotiate an end to the Spanish-American War with Spain. [3] Day, however, negotiated peace with Spain on McKinley’s harsher terms. [3] His final diplomatic effort was to lead the United States Peace Commission into Paris, France and sign the Treaty of Paris ending the war. [3] He was succeeded at the Department of State by John Hay. Day received a recess appointment from President Benjamin Harrison to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio on May 24, 1889, but declined the appointment. Day was nominated by President William McKinley on February 25, 1899, to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and the United States Circuit Courts for the Sixth Circuit, to a new joint seat authorized by 30 Stat. [1] He was confirmed by the United States Senate on February 28, 1899, and received his commission the same day. [1] His service terminated on February 23, 1903, due to his elevation to the Supreme Court. McKinley was assassinated in September 1901 and the Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him as president. [5] In 1903, George Shiras Jr. Resigned from the United States Supreme Court and Roosevelt offered his Associate Justice position to William Howard Taft. [5] Taft declined in order to remain in his post as governor of the Philippines. [5] In February, Roosevelt nominated Day, who accepted. [5] The United States Senate confirmed the nomination on February 23, 1903, and Day received his commission the same day. [5] He assumed his seat on March 2, 1903. [1] He served as Circuit Justice for the Seventh Circuit from March 9, 1903, to March 17, 1912, and as Circuit Justice for the Sixth Circuit from March 18, 1912, to November 13, 1922. Day wrote 439 opinions during his tenure on the court, of which only 18 were dissents. [5] He distrusted large corporations and voted with antitrust majorities throughout his time on the court. [5] He sided with the government in the Standard Oil, American Tobacco, and Union Pacific cases in 1911 and 1912 and again in the Southern Pacific case in 1922. Day delivered the opinion of the Court in Weeks v. United States, where the highest Court ruled that the warrantless seizure of documents from a private home violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, and evidence obtained in this manner is excluded from use in federal criminal prosecutions. Day was an avid baseball fan. [6] He is recorded as asking his clerk for “regular updates” during the bench hearing of Standard Sanitary Mfg. United States about the final game of the 1912 World Series. Day retired from the court on November 13, 1922, [1] and briefly served as an Umpire of the Mixed Claims Commission to Adjudicate War Claims against Germany. [1] He died on July 9, 1923, on Mackinac Island in Michigan, aged 74. [1] He was interred at West Lawn Cemetery in Canton. In 1875, Day married Mary Elizabeth Schaefer. [2] They were married until her death in 1912, and were the parents of four sons – William, Rufus, Stephen, and Luther. Ware & Leland v. Mobile County, 209 U. United States, 219 U. 346 (1911) – held that there must be an actual controversy between parties for the Federal courts to have jurisdiction. O’Donnell, 229 U. 1 (1913) – held that patent rights could not be extended by the holder by means of a licensing agreement. United States, 232 U. 383 (1914) – held that exclusionary rule is applicable to the federal government for violations of the Fourth Amendment. 60 (1917) – held that municipal ordinances segregating neighborhoods were unconstitutional. 251 (1918) – held that laws regulating child labor are beyond the scope of Congress’s constitutional power under the commerce clause. List of Justices of the United States Supreme Court. William Rufus Day at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center. Cushman, Clare, The Supreme Court Historical Society, ed. The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies. CQ Press: Thousand Oaks, CA. American Statesmen: Secretaries of State from John Jay to Colin Powell. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Profile: The Honorable William R. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Law School. Retrieved August 8, 2019. A Crank on the Court: The Passion of Justice William R. Moore, Gay Morgan (2009). Postcard History Series: Canton. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States of America. It has ultimate (and largely discretionary) appellate jurisdiction over all federal and state court cases that involve a point of federal law, and original jurisdiction over a narrow range of cases, specifically “all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party”. [2] The Court holds the power of judicial review, the ability to invalidate a statute for violating a provision of the Constitution. It is also able to strike down presidential directives for violating either the Constitution or statutory law. [3] However, it may act only within the context of a case in an area of law over which it has jurisdiction. The Court may decide cases having political overtones, but it has ruled that it does not have power to decide non-justiciable political questions. Established by Article Three of the United States Constitution, the composition and procedures of the Supreme Court were initially established by the 1st Congress through the Judiciary Act of 1789. As later set by the Judiciary Act of 1869, the Court consists of the chief justice of the United States and eight associate justices. Each justice has lifetime tenure, meaning they remain on the Court until they resign, retire, die, or are removed from office. [4] When a vacancy occurs, the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate, appoints a new justice. Each justice has a single vote in deciding the cases argued before it. When in majority, the chief justice decides who writes the opinion of the court; otherwise, the most senior justice in the majority assigns the task of writing the opinion. The Court meets in the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D. Its law enforcement arm is the Supreme Court Police. Earliest beginnings through Marshall. From Taney to Taft. Nomination, confirmation, and appointment. Size of the court. Justices as circuit justices. Citations to published opinions. Institutional powers and constraints. Politicization of the Court. Courts are a poor check on executive power. Federal versus state power. Judicial interference in political disputes. Not choosing enough cases to review. Accepting gifts and outside income. Landmark Supreme Court decisions (selection). Main article: History of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was while debating the separation of powers between the legislative and executive departments that delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention established the parameters for the national judiciary. Creating a “third branch” of government was a novel idea; in the English tradition, judicial matters had been treated as an aspect of royal (executive) authority. Early on, the delegates who were opposed to having a strong central government argued that national laws could be enforced by state courts, while others, including James Madison, advocated for a national judicial authority consisting of various tribunals chosen by the national legislature. It was also proposed that the judiciary should have a role in checking the executive’s power to veto or revise laws. In the end, the framers compromised by sketching only a general outline of the judiciary, vesting federal judicial power in “one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish”. [5][6] They delineated neither the exact powers and prerogatives of the Supreme Court nor the organization of the judicial branch as a whole. The 1st United States Congress provided the detailed organization of a federal judiciary through the Judiciary Act of 1789. The Supreme Court, the country’s highest judicial tribunal, was to sit in the nation’s Capital and would initially be composed of a chief justice and five associate justices. The act also divided the country into judicial districts, which were in turn organized into circuits. Justices were required to “ride circuit” and hold circuit court twice a year in their assigned judicial district. Immediately after signing the act into law, President George Washington nominated the following people to serve on the court: John Jay for chief justice and John Rutledge, William Cushing, Robert H. Harrison, James Wilson, and John Blair Jr. All six were confirmed by the Senate on September 26, 1789. Harrison, however, declined to serve. In his place, Washington later nominated James Iredell. [9] A second session was held there in August 1790. [10] The earliest sessions of the court were devoted to organizational proceedings, as the first cases did not reach it until 1791. [7] When the nation’s capital was moved to Philadelphia in 1790, the Supreme Court did so as well. After initially meeting at Independence Hall, the Court established its chambers at City Hall. Main articles: Jay Court, Rutledge Court, Ellsworth Court, and Marshall Court. Barnes (1791), a case involving procedure. [12] As the Court initially had only six members, every decision that it made by a majority was also made by two-thirds (voting four to two). [13] However, Congress has always allowed less than the court’s full membership to make decisions, starting with a quorum of four justices in 1789. [14] The court lacked a home of its own and had little prestige, [15] a situation not helped by the era’s highest-profile case, Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), which was reversed within two years by the adoption of the Eleventh Amendment. [17] Under Marshall, the court established the power of judicial review over acts of Congress, [18] including specifying itself as the supreme expositor of the Constitution Marbury v. Madison[19][20] and making several important constitutional rulings that gave shape and substance to the balance of power between the federal government and states notably, Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, McCulloch v. Maryland and Gibbons v. [21][22][23][24]. The Marshall Court also ended the practice of each justice issuing his opinion seriatim, [25] a remnant of British tradition, [26] and instead issuing a single majority opinion. [25] Also during Marshall’s tenure, although beyond the Court’s control, the impeachment and acquittal of Justice Samuel Chase in 1804-05 helped cement the principle of judicial independence. Main articles: Taney Court, Chase Court, Waite Court, Fuller Court, White Court, and Taft Court. Sill, which held that while Congress may not limit the subjects the Supreme Court may hear, it may limit the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts to prevent them from hearing cases dealing with certain subjects. [29] Nevertheless, it is primarily remembered for its ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, [30] which helped precipitate the Civil War. New York;[32] Adair v. New York, [34] grappled with the new antitrust statutes Standard Oil Co. Of New Jersey v. United States, upheld the constitutionality of military conscription (Selective Draft Law Cases)[35] and brought the substantive due process doctrine to its first apogee Adkins v. Main articles: Hughes Court, Stone Court, and Vinson Court. The Hughes Court in 1937, photographed by Erich Salomon. Members include Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (center), Louis Brandeis, Benjamin N. Cardozo, Harlan Stone, Owen Roberts, and the “Four Horsemen” Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter, who opposed New Deal policies. Filburn, United States v. Darby and United States v. [38][39][40] During World War II, the Court continued to favor government power, upholding the internment of Japanese citizens Korematsu v. United States and the mandatory pledge of allegiance Minersville School District v. Nevertheless, Gobitis was soon repudiated West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, and the Steel Seizure Case restricted the pro-government trend. Main articles: Warren Court and Burger Court. [41] It held that segregation in public schools violates the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling v. Sharpe and Green v. [42] and that legislative districts must be roughly equal in population Reynolds v. It created a general right to privacy Griswold v. Connecticut, [43] limited the role of religion in public school most prominently Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp, [44][45] incorporated most guarantees of the Bill of Rights against the States-prominently Mapp v. Ohio (the exclusionary rule) and Gideon v. Wainwright (right to appointed counsel), [46][47]-and required that criminal suspects be apprised of all these rights by police Miranda v. [48] At the same time, however, the Court limited defamation suits by public figures New York Times v. Sullivan and supplied the government with an unbroken run of antitrust victories. [50] It also expanded Griswold’s right to privacy to strike down abortion laws Roe v. Wade, [51] but divided deeply on affirmative action Regents of the University of California v. Bakke[52] and campaign finance regulation Buckley v. [53] It also wavered on the death penalty, ruling first that most applications were defective Furman v. Georgia, [54] but later, that the death penalty itself was not unconstitutional Gregg v. Main articles: Rehnquist Court and Roberts Court. Justices of the Supreme Court with President George W. Bush (center), October 2005. Lopez and the force of its restrictions on those powers Seminole Tribe v. Florida, City of Boerne v. [58][59][60][61][62] It struck down single-sex state schools as a violation of equal protection United States v. Virginia, laws against sodomy as violations of substantive due process Lawrence v. Texas, [63] and the line item veto Clinton v. New York, but upheld school vouchers Zelman v. Simmons-Harris and reaffirmed Roe’s restrictions on abortion laws Planned Parenthood v. [64] The Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, which ended the electoral recount during the presidential election of 2000, was especially controversial. The Roberts Court (2005-present) is regarded as more conservative than the Rehnquist Court. [67][68][69][70] Some of its major rulings have concerned federal preemption Wyeth v. Levine, civil procedure (Twombly-Iqbal), abortion Gonzales v. Carhart, [71] climate change Massachusetts v. EPA, same-sex marriage United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges and the Bill of Rights, notably in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (First Amendment), [72] Heller-McDonald (Second Amendment)[73] and Baze v. Main article: Nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court of the United States. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution, known as the Appointments Clause, empowers the president to nominate and, with the confirmation (advice and consent) of the United States Senate, to appoint public officials, including justices of the Supreme Court. This clause is one example of the system of checks and balances inherent in the Constitution. The president has the plenary power to nominate, while the Senate possesses the plenary power to reject or confirm the nominee. The Constitution sets no qualifications for service as a justice, thus a president may nominate anyone to serve, and the Senate may not set any qualifications or otherwise limit who the president can choose. Flowchart showing process of appointment of United States Supreme Court justices. In modern times, the confirmation process has attracted considerable attention from the press and advocacy groups, which lobby senators to confirm or to reject a nominee depending on whether their track record aligns with the group’s views. The Senate Judiciary Committee conducts hearings and votes on whether the nomination should go to the full Senate with a positive, negative or neutral report. The committee’s practice of personally interviewing nominees is relatively recent. The first nominee to appear before the committee was Harlan Fiske Stone in 1925, who sought to quell concerns about his links to Wall Street, and the modern practice of questioning began with John Marshall Harlan II in 1955. [77] Once the committee reports out the nomination, the full Senate considers it. Rejections are relatively uncommon; the Senate has explicitly rejected twelve Supreme Court nominees, most recently Robert Bork, nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. Although Senate rules do not necessarily allow a negative vote in committee to block a nomination, prior to 2017 a nomination could be blocked by filibuster once debate had begun in the full Senate. Johnson’s nomination of sitting Associate Justice Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as Chief Justice in 1968 was the first successful filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee. It included both Republican and Democratic senators concerned with Fortas’s ethics. President Donald Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death was the second. Unlike the Fortas filibuster, however, only Democratic Senators voted against cloture on the Gorsuch nomination, citing his perceived conservative judicial philosophy, and the Republican majority’s prior refusal to take up President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy. [78] This led the Republican majority to change the rules and eliminate the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations. Not every Supreme Court nominee has received a floor vote in the Senate. A president may withdraw a nomination before an actual confirmation vote occurs, typically because it is clear that the Senate will reject the nominee; this occurred most recently with President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers in 2005. The Senate may also fail to act on a nomination, which expires at the end of the session. For example, President Dwight Eisenhower’s first nomination of John Marshall Harlan II in November 1954 was not acted on by the Senate; Eisenhower re-nominated Harlan in January 1955, and Harlan was confirmed two months later. Most recently, as previously noted, the Senate failed to act on the March 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland; the nomination expired in January 2017, and the vacancy was filled by Neil Gorsuch, an appointee of President Trump. Once the Senate confirms a nomination, the president must prepare and sign a commission, to which the Seal of the Department of Justice must be affixed, before the new justice can take office. [81] The seniority of an associate justice is based on the commissioning date, not the confirmation or swearing-in date. [82] The importance of commissioning is underscored by the case of Edwin M. Although appointed to the court on December 19, 1869, by President Ulysses S. Grant and confirmed by the Senate a few days later, Stanton died on December 24, prior to receiving his commission. He is not, therefore, considered to have been an actual member of the court. Before 1981, the approval process of justices was usually rapid. From the Truman through Nixon administrations, justices were typically approved within one month. From the Reagan administration to the present, however, the process has taken much longer. Some believe this is because Congress sees justices as playing a more political role than in the past. [83] According to the Congressional Research Service, the average number of days from nomination to final Senate vote since 1975 is 67 days (2.2 months), while the median is 71 days (or 2.3 months). When the Senate is in recess, a president may make temporary appointments to fill vacancies. Recess appointees hold office only until the end of the next Senate session (less than two years). The Senate must confirm the nominee for them to continue serving; of the two chief justices and eleven associate justices who have received recess appointments, only Chief Justice John Rutledge was not subsequently confirmed. No president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has made a recess appointment to the Court, and the practice has become rare and controversial even in lower federal courts. [87] In 1960, after Eisenhower had made three such appointments, the Senate passed a “sense of the Senate” resolution that recess appointments to the Court should only be made in “unusual circumstances”. [88] Such resolutions are not legally binding but are an expression of Congress’s views in the hope of guiding executive action. The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning limited the ability of the President to make recess appointments (including appointments to the Supreme Court); the Court ruled that the Senate decides when the Senate is in session (or in recess). Writing for the Court, Justice Breyer stated, We hold that, for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says it is, provided that, under its own rules, it retains the capacity to transact Senate business. [90] This ruling allows the Senate to prevent recess appointments through the use of pro-forma sessions. The interior of the United States Supreme Court. The Constitution provides that justices “shall hold their offices during good behavior” (unless appointed during a Senate recess). The term “good behavior” is understood to mean justices may serve for the remainder of their lives, unless they are impeached and convicted by Congress, resign, or retire. [92] Only one justice has been impeached by the House of Representatives (Samuel Chase, March 1804), but he was acquitted in the Senate (March 1805). [93] Moves to impeach sitting justices have occurred more recently for example, William O. Douglas was the subject of hearings twice, in 1953 and again in 1970; and Abe Fortas resigned while hearings were being organized in 1969, but they did not reach a vote in the House. No mechanism exists for removing a justice who is permanently incapacitated by illness or injury, but unable (or unwilling) to resign. Because justices have indefinite tenure, timing of vacancies can be unpredictable. Sometimes vacancies arise in quick succession, as in the early 1970s when Lewis F. And William Rehnquist were nominated to replace Hugo Black and John Marshall Harlan II, who retired within a week of each other. Sometimes a great length of time passes between nominations, such as the eleven years between Stephen Breyer’s nomination in 1994 to succeed Harry Blackmun and the nomination of John Roberts in 2005 to fill the seat of Sandra Day O’Connor (though Roberts’ nomination was withdrawn and resubmitted for the role of chief justice after Rehnquist died). Despite the variability, all but four presidents have been able to appoint at least one justice. William Henry Harrison died a month after taking office, though his successor (John Tyler) made an appointment during that presidential term. Likewise, Zachary Taylor died 16 months after taking office, but his successor (Millard Fillmore) also made a Supreme Court nomination before the end of that term. Andrew Johnson, who became president after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, was denied the opportunity to appoint a justice by a reduction in the size of the court. Jimmy Carter is the only person elected president to have left office after at least one full term without having the opportunity to appoint a justice. Presidents James Monroe, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George W. Bush each served a full term without an opportunity to appoint a justice, but made appointments during their subsequent terms in office. No president who has served more than one full term has gone without at least one opportunity to make an appointment. Article III of the Constitution sets neither the size of the Supreme Court nor any specific positions on it (though the existence of the office of the chief justice is tacitly acknowledged in Article I, Section 3, Clause 6). Instead, these powers have typically been entrusted to Congress, which initially established a six-member Supreme Court composed of a chief justice and five associate justices through the Judiciary Act of 1789. The size of the Court was first altered by an 1801 act which would have reduced the size of the court to five members upon its next vacancy, but an 1802 act promptly negated the 1801 act, legally restoring the court’s size to six members before any such vacancy occurred. As the nation’s boundaries grew across the continent and as Supreme Court justices in those days had to ride the circuit, an arduous process requiring long travel on horseback or carriage over harsh terrain that resulted in months-long extended stays away from home, Congress added justices to correspond with the growth: seven in 1807, nine in 1837, and ten in 1863. In 1866, at the behest of Chief Justice Chase and in an attempt to limit the power of Andrew Johnson, Congress passed an act providing that the next three justices to retire would not be replaced, which would thin the bench to seven justices by attrition. Consequently, one seat was removed in 1866 and a second in 1867. Roosevelt attempted to expand the Court in 1937. His proposal envisioned the appointment of one additional justice for each incumbent justice who reached the age of 70 years 6 months and refused retirement, up to a maximum bench of 15 justices. The proposal was ostensibly to ease the burden of the docket on elderly judges, but the actual purpose was widely understood as an effort to “pack” the Court with justices who would support Roosevelt’s New Deal. [98] The plan, usually called the “court-packing plan”, failed in Congress after members of Roosevelt’s own Democratic Party believed it to be unconstitutional, it was defeated 70-20 in the United States Senate and the Senate Judiciary Committee reported that it was “essential to the continuance of our constitutional democracy” that the proposal be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America. “[99][100][101][102] It remains unclear whether it would be at all constitutional or not to expand the size of the Supreme Court in ways understood to be designed to “pack it with justices that would rule more favorably on a President’s agenda or to simply change the ideological composition of the court. See also: List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. There are currently nine justices on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and eight associate justices. Among the current members of the Court, Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving justice, with a tenure of 10,794 days (29 years, 201 days) as of May 12, 2021; the most recent justice to join the court is Amy Coney Barrett, whose tenure began on October 27, 2020. Current justices of the Supreme Court[106]. Previous position or office. (most recent prior to joining the Court). File-Official roberts CJ cropped. 15 years, 225 days. Clarence Thomas official SCOTUS portrait (cropped). 29 years, 201 days. Stephen Breyer official SCOTUS portrait crop. 26 years, 282 days. Samuel Alito official photo (cropped). 15 years, 101 days. Sonia Sotomayor in SCOTUS robe crop. The Bronx, New York. 11 years, 277 days. 10 years, 278 days. Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch Official Portrait (cropped 2). 4 years, 32 days. Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh Official Portrait. 2 years, 218 days. This graphical timeline depicts the length of each current Supreme Court justice’s tenure (not seniority) on the Court. Further information: Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court currently has six male and three female justices. Among the nine justices, there is one African-American justice (Justice Thomas) and one Hispanic justice (Justice Sotomayor). One of the justices was born to at least one immigrant parent: Justice Alito’s father was born in Italy. At least six justices are Roman Catholics and two are Jewish. It is unclear whether Neil Gorsuch considers himself a Catholic or an Episcopalian. [109] Historically, most justices have been Protestants, including 36 Episcopalians, 19 Presbyterians, 10 Unitarians, 5 Methodists, and 3 Baptists. [110][111] The first Catholic justice was Roger Taney in 1836, [112] and 1916 saw the appointment of the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis. [113] In recent years the historical situation has reversed, as most recent justices have been either Catholic or Jewish. All current justices except for Amy Coney Barrett have Ivy League backgrounds as either undergraduates or law students. Barrett received her bachelor’s degree at Rhodes College and her law degree at the University of Notre Dame. [114] Three justices are from the state of New York, and one each is from California, New Jersey, Georgia, Colorado, Louisiana and Washington, D. The first four female justices: O’Connor, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan. For much of the Court’s history, every justice was a man of Northwestern European descent, and almost always Protestant. Diversity concerns focused on geography, to represent all regions of the country, rather than religious, ethnic, or gender diversity. [117] Racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in the Court increased in the late 20th century. Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American justice in 1967. [113] Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female justice in 1981. [113] In 1986, Antonin Scalia became the first Italian-American justice. Marshall was succeeded by African-American Clarence Thomas in 1991. [118] O’Connor was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993. [119] After O’Connor’s retirement Ginsburg was joined in 2009 by Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic and Latina justice, [113] and in 2010 by Elena Kagan. [119] After Ginsburg’s death on September 18, 2020, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as the fifth woman in the Court’s history on October 26, 2020. There are currently three living retired justices of the Supreme Court of the United States: Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter. As retired justices, they no longer participate in the work of the Supreme Court, but may be designated for temporary assignments to sit on lower federal courts, usually the United States Courts of Appeals. Such assignments are formally made by the chief justice, on request of the chief judge of the lower court and with the consent of the retired justice. In recent years, Justice O’Connor has sat with several Courts of Appeals around the country, and Justice Souter has frequently sat on the First Circuit, the court of which he was briefly a member before joining the Supreme Court. The status of a retired justice is analogous to that of a circuit or district court judge who has taken senior status, and eligibility of a Supreme Court justice to assume retired status (rather than simply resign from the bench) is governed by the same age and service criteria. In recent times, justices tend to strategically plan their decisions to leave the bench with personal, institutional, ideological, partisan and sometimes even political factors playing a role. [120][121] The fear of mental decline and death often motivates justices to step down. The desire to maximize the Court’s strength and legitimacy through one retirement at a time, when the Court is in recess, and during non-presidential election years suggests a concern for institutional health. Finally, especially in recent decades, many justices have timed their departure to coincide with a philosophically compatible president holding office, to ensure that a like-minded successor would be appointed. Retired justices of the Supreme Court[106]. Sandra Day O’Connor crop. Sandra Day O’Connor. 24 years, 128 days. Anthony Kennedy official SCOTUS portrait crop. 30 years, 163 days. 18 years, 263 days. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: “Supreme Court of the United States” – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (January 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this template message). The current Roberts Court justices (since October 2020). Front row (left to right): Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. Back row (left to right): Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. For the most part, the day-to-day activities of the justices are governed by rules of protocol based upon the seniority of justices. The chief justice always ranks first in the order of precedence-regardless of the length of their service. The associate justices are then ranked by the length of their service. The chief justice sits in the center on the bench, or at the head of the table during conferences. The other justices are seated in order of seniority. The senior-most associate justice sits immediately to the chief justice’s right; the second most senior sits immediately to their left. The seats alternate right to left in order of seniority, with the most junior justice occupying the last seat. Therefore, starting in the middle of the October 2020 term, the court will sit as follows from left to right, from the perspective of those facing the Court: Kavanaugh, Kagan, Alito, Thomas (most senior associate justice), Roberts (chief justice), Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Barrett. Likewise, when the members of the Court gather for official group photographs, justices are arranged in order of seniority, with the five most senior members seated in the front row in the same order as they would sit during Court sessions, and the four most junior justices standing behind them, again in the same order as they would sit during Court sessions. In the justices’ private conferences, current practice is for them to speak and vote in order of seniority, beginning with the chief justice first and ending with the most junior associate justice. By custom, the most junior associate justice in these conferences is charged with any menial tasks the justices may require as they convene alone, such as answering the door of their conference room, serving beverages and transmitting orders of the court to the clerk. [124] Justice Joseph Story served the longest as junior justice, from February 3, 1812, to September 1, 1823, for a total of 4,228 days. Justice Stephen Breyer follows very closely behind serving from August 3, 1994, to January 31, 2006, for a total of 4,199 days. [125] Justice Elena Kagan comes in at a distant third serving from August 6, 2010, to April 10, 2017, for a total of 2,439 days. Main article: Federal judge salaries in the United States. [126] Article III, Section 1 of the U. Constitution prohibits Congress from reducing the pay for incumbent justices. Once a justice meets age and service requirements, the justice may retire. Judicial pensions are based on the same formula used for federal employees, but a justice’s pension, as with other federal courts judges, can never be less than their salary at the time of retirement. Further information: Ideological leanings of United States Supreme Court justices. Although justices are nominated by the president in power, and receive confirmation by the Senate, justices do not represent or receive official endorsements from political parties, as is accepted practice in the legislative and executive branches. Jurists are, however, informally categorized in legal and political circles as being judicial conservatives, moderates, or liberals. Such leanings, however, generally refer to legal outlook rather than a political or legislative one. The nominations of justices are endorsed by individual politicians in the legislative branch who vote their approval[clarification needed] or disapproval of the nominated justice. The ideologies of jurists can be measured and compared with several metrics, including the Segal-Cover score, Martin-Quinn score, and Judicial Common Space score. Following the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, the Court currently consists of six justices appointed by Republican presidents and three appointed by Democratic presidents. It is popularly accepted that Chief Justice Roberts and associate justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett appointed by Republican presidents, compose the Court’s conservative wing. Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, appointed by Democratic presidents, compose the Court’s liberal wing. Gorsuch had a track record as a reliably conservative judge in the 10th circuit. [129] Kavanaugh was considered one of the more conservative judges in the DC Circuit prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court. [130][131] Likewise, Barrett’s brief track record on the Seventh Circuit is conservative. [132] Prior to Justice Ginsburg’s death, Chief Justice Roberts was considered the Court’s median justice (in the middle of the ideological spectrum, with four justices more liberal and four more conservative than him), making him the ideological center of the Court. Tom Goldstein argued in an article in SCOTUSblog in 2010, that the popular view of the Supreme Court as sharply divided along ideological lines and each side pushing an agenda at every turn is “in significant part a caricature designed to fit certain preconceptions”. [135] He pointed out that in the 2009 term, almost half the cases were decided unanimously, and only about 20% were decided by a 5-to-4 vote. Barely one in ten cases involved the narrow liberal/conservative divide (fewer if the cases where Sotomayor recused herself are not included). He also pointed to several cases that defied the popular conception of the ideological lines of the Court. [136] Goldstein further argued that the large number of pro-criminal-defendant summary dismissals (usually cases where the justices decide that the lower courts significantly misapplied precedent and reverse the case without briefing or argument) were an illustration that the conservative justices had not been aggressively ideological. Likewise, Goldstein stated that the critique that the liberal justices are more likely to invalidate acts of Congress, show inadequate deference to the political process, and be disrespectful of precedent, also lacked merit: Thomas has most often called for overruling prior precedent (even if long standing) that he views as having been wrongly decided, and during the 2009 term Scalia and Thomas voted most often to invalidate legislation. According to statistics compiled by SCOTUSblog, in the twelve terms from 2000 to 2011, an average of 19 of the opinions on major issues (22%) were decided by a 5-4 vote, with an average of 70% of those split opinions decided by a Court divided along the traditionally perceived ideological lines (about 15% of all opinions issued). Over that period, the conservative bloc has been in the majority about 62% of the time that the Court has divided along ideological lines, which represents about 44% of all the 5-4 decisions. In the October 2010 term, the Court decided 86 cases, including 75 signed opinions and 5 summary reversals (where the Court reverses a lower court without arguments and without issuing an opinion on the case). [138][139] Four were decided with unsigned opinions, two cases affirmed by an equally divided Court, and two cases were dismissed as improvidently granted. Justice Kagan recused herself from 26 of the cases due to her prior role as United States Solicitor General. Of the 80 cases, 38 (about 48%, the highest percentage since the October 2005 term) were decided unanimously (9-0 or 8-0), and 16 decisions were made by a 5-4 vote (about 20%, compared to 18% in the October 2009 term, and 29% in the October 2008 term). [140] However, in fourteen of the sixteen 5-4 decisions, the Court divided along the traditional ideological lines (with Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan on the liberal side, and Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito on the conservative, and Kennedy providing the “swing vote”). This represents 87% of those 16 cases, the highest rate in the past 10 years. The conservative bloc, joined by Kennedy, formed the majority in 63% of the 5-4 decisions, the highest cohesion rate of that bloc in the Roberts Court. The October 2017 term had a low rate of unanimous rulings, with only 39% of the cases decided by unanimous rulings, the lowest percentage since the October 2008 term when 30% of rulings were unanimous. [142] Chief Justice Roberts was in the majority most often (68 out of 73 cases, or 93.2%), with retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy in second (67 out of 73 cases, or 91.8%); this was typical of the Roberts Court, in which Roberts and Kennedy have been in the majority most frequently in all terms except for the 2013 and 2014 terms (though Kennedy was in the top on both those terms). [143] Justice Sotomayor was the justice least likely to be in the majority (in 50 out of 73 cases, or 68.5%). The highest agreement between justices was between Ginsburg and Sotomayor, who agreed on 95.8% of the cases, followed by Thomas and Alito agreeing on 93% of cases. There were 19 cases that were decided by a 5-4 vote (26% of the total cases); 74% of those cases (14 out of 19) broke along ideological lines, and for the first time in the Roberts Court, all of those resulted in a conservative majority, with Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch on the majority. The October 2018 term, which saw the replacement of Anthony Kennedy by Brett Kavanaugh, once again saw a low rate of unanimity: only 28 of 71 decided cases were decided by a unanimous court, about 39% of the cases. [144][145] Of these, only 19 cases had the Justices in total agreement. Chief Justice Roberts was once again the justice most often in the majority (61 out of 72 cases, or 85% of the time). Though Kavanaugh had a higher percentage of times in the majority, he did not participate in all cases, voting in the majority 58 out of 64 times, or 91% of the cases in which he participated. Of the justices who participated in all 72 cases, Kagan and Alito tied in second place, voting in the majority 59 out of 72 times (or 82% of the time). Looking only at cases that were not decided unanimously, Roberts and Kavanaugh were the most frequently in the majority (33 cases, with Roberts being in the majority in 75% of the divided cases, and Kavanaugh in 85% of the divided cases he participated in). Of 20 cases that were decided by a vote of 5-4, eight featured the conservative justices in the majority (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh), and eight had the liberal justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) joined by a conservative: Gorsuch was the most frequent, joining them four times, and the remaining conservative justices joining the liberals once each. The remaining 4 cases were decided by different coalitions. [145] The highest agreement between justices was between Roberts and Kavanaugh, who agreed at least in judgement 94% of the time; the second highest agreement was again between Ginsburg and Sotomayor, who agreed 93% of the time. The highest rate of full agreement was between Ginsburg and Kagan (82% of the time), closely followed by Roberts and Alito, Ginsburg and Sotomayor, and Breyer and Kagan (81% of the time). The largest rate of disagreement was between Thomas and both Ginsburg and Sotomayor; Thomas disagreed with each of them 50% of the time. Main article: United States Supreme Court Building. Supreme Court building as viewed from the front. From the 1860s until the 1930s, the court sat in the Old Senate Chamber of the U. When Philadelphia became the capital, the Court met briefly in Independence Hall before settling in Old City Hall from 1791 until 1800. After the government moved to Washington, D. The Court occupied various spaces in the United States Capitol building until 1935, when it moved into its own purpose-built home. The four-story building was designed by Cass Gilbert in a classical style sympathetic to the surrounding buildings of the Capitol and Library of Congress, and is clad in marble. The building includes the courtroom, justices’ chambers, an extensive law library, various meeting spaces, and auxiliary services including a gymnasium. The Supreme Court building is within the ambit of the Architect of the Capitol, but maintains its own police force separate from the Capitol Police. [147] Visitors may not tour the actual courtroom unaccompanied. There is a cafeteria, a gift shop, exhibits, and a half-hour informational film. [146] When the Court is in session the public may attend oral arguments, which are held twice each morning (and sometimes afternoons) on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays in two-week intervals from October through late April, with breaks during December and February. Visitors are seated on a first-come first-served basis. One estimate is there are about 250 seats available. [149] The number of open seats varies from case to case; for important cases, some visitors arrive the day before and wait through the night. [146] Supreme Court Police are available to answer questions. Inscription on the wall of the Supreme Court Building from Marbury v. Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall outlined the concept of judicial review. Congress is authorized by Article III of the federal Constitution to regulate the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. The Supreme Court has original and exclusive jurisdiction over cases between two or more states[150] but may decline to hear such cases. [151] It also possesses original but not exclusive jurisdiction to hear “all actions or proceedings to which ambassadors, other public ministers, consuls, or vice consuls of foreign states are parties; all controversies between the United States and a State; and all actions or proceedings by a State against the citizens of another State or against aliens”. In 1906, the Court asserted its original jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for contempt of court in United States v. [153] The resulting proceeding remains the only contempt proceeding and only criminal trial in the Court’s history. [154][155] The contempt proceeding arose from the lynching of Ed Johnson in Chattanooga, Tennessee the evening after Justice John Marshall Harlan granted Johnson a stay of execution to allow his lawyers to file an appeal. Johnson was removed from his jail cell by a lynch mob, aided by the local sheriff who left the prison virtually unguarded, and hanged from a bridge, after which a deputy sheriff pinned a note on Johnson’s body reading: To Justice Harlan. Come get your nigger now. [154] The local sheriff, John Shipp, cited the Supreme Court’s intervention as the rationale for the lynching. The Court appointed its deputy clerk as special master to preside over the trial in Chattanooga with closing arguments made in Washington before the Supreme Court justices, who found nine individuals guilty of contempt, sentencing three to 90 days in jail and the rest to 60 days in jail. In all other cases, however, the Court has only appellate jurisdiction, including the ability to issue writs of mandamus and writs of prohibition to lower courts. It considers cases based on its original jurisdiction very rarely; almost all cases are brought to the Supreme Court on appeal. In practice, the only original jurisdiction cases heard by the Court are disputes between two or more states. [161] In the last case, an appeal may be made to the Supreme Court from a lower state court if the state’s highest court declined to hear an appeal or lacks jurisdiction to hear an appeal. For example, a decision rendered by one of the Florida District Courts of Appeal can be appealed to the U. Supreme Court if (a) the Supreme Court of Florida declined to grant certiorari, e. Or (b) the district court of appeal issued a per curiam decision simply affirming the lower court’s decision without discussing the merits of the case, since the Supreme Court of Florida lacks jurisdiction to hear appeals of such decisions. [162] The power of the Supreme Court to consider appeals from state courts, rather than just federal courts, was created by the Judiciary Act of 1789 and upheld early in the Court’s history, by its rulings in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) and Cohens v. The Supreme Court is the only federal court that has jurisdiction over direct appeals from state court decisions, although there are several devices that permit so-called “collateral review” of state cases. It has to be noted that this “collateral review” often only applies to individuals on death row and not through the regular judicial system. Since Article Three of the United States Constitution stipulates that federal courts may only entertain “cases” or “controversies”, the Supreme Court cannot decide cases that are moot and it does not render advisory opinions, as the supreme courts of some states may do. For example, in DeFunis v. 312 (1974), the Court dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a law school affirmative action policy because the plaintiff student had graduated since he began the lawsuit, and a decision from the Court on his claim would not be able to redress any injury he had suffered. However, the Court recognizes some circumstances where it is appropriate to hear a case that is seemingly moot. If an issue is “capable of repetition yet evading review”, the Court will address it even though the party before the Court would not themselves be made whole by a favorable result. 113 (1973), and other abortion cases, the Court addresses the merits of claims pressed by pregnant women seeking abortions even if they are no longer pregnant because it takes longer than the typical human gestation period to appeal a case through the lower courts to the Supreme Court. Another mootness exception is voluntary cessation of unlawful conduct, in which the Court considers the probability of recurrence and plaintiff’s need for relief. The United States is divided into thirteen circuit courts of appeals, each of which is assigned a “circuit justice” from the Supreme Court. Although this concept has been in continuous existence throughout the history of the republic, its meaning has changed through time. Under the Judiciary Act of 1789, each justice was required to “ride circuit”, or to travel within the assigned circuit and consider cases alongside local judges. This practice encountered opposition from many justices, who cited the difficulty of travel. Moreover, there was a potential for a conflict of interest on the Court if a justice had previously decided the same case while riding circuit. Circuit riding ended in 1901, when the Circuit Court of Appeals Act was passed, and circuit riding was officially abolished by Congress in 1911. The circuit justice for each circuit is responsible for dealing with certain types of applications that, under the Court’s rules, may be addressed by a single justice. These include applications for emergency stays (including stays of execution in death-penalty cases) and injunctions pursuant to the All Writs Act arising from cases within that circuit, as well as routine requests such as requests for extensions of time. In the past, when? Circuit justices also sometimes ruled on motions for bail in criminal cases, writs of habeas corpus, and applications for writs of error granting permission to appeal. Ordinarily, a justice will resolve such an application by simply endorsing it “granted” or “denied” or entering a standard form of order. However, the justice may elect to write an opinion-referred to as an in-chambers opinion-in such matters if they wish. A circuit justice may sit as a judge on the Court of Appeals of that circuit, but over the past hundred years, this has rarely occurred. A circuit justice sitting with the Court of Appeals has seniority over the chief judge of the circuit. The chief justice has traditionally been assigned to the District of Columbia Circuit, the Fourth Circuit (which includes Maryland and Virginia, the states surrounding the District of Columbia), and since it was established, the Federal Circuit. Each associate justice is assigned to one or two judicial circuits. As of November 20, 2020, the allotment of the justices among the circuits is as follows:[166]. District of Columbia Circuit. Six of the current justices are assigned to circuits on which they previously sat as circuit judges: Chief Justice Roberts D. Circuit, Justice Breyer (First Circuit), Justice Sotomayor (Second Circuit), Justice Alito (Third Circuit), Justice Barrett (Seventh Circuit), and Justice Gorsuch (Tenth Circuit). Main article: Procedures of the Supreme Court of the United States. A term of the Supreme Court commences on the first Monday of each October, and continues until June or early July of the following year. Each term consists of alternating periods of around two weeks known as “sittings” and “recesses”. Justices hear cases and deliver rulings during sittings; they discuss cases and write opinions during recesses. Nearly all cases come before the court by way of petitions for writs of certiorari, commonly referred to as “cert”. The Court may review any case in the federal courts of appeals “by writ of certiorari granted upon the petition of any party to any civil or criminal case”. [167] The Court may only review “final judgments rendered by the highest court of a state in which a decision could be had” if those judgments involve a question of federal statutory or constitutional law. [168] The party that appealed to the Court is the petitioner and the non-mover is the respondent. All case names before the Court are styled petitioner v. Respondent, regardless of which party initiated the lawsuit in the trial court. For example, criminal prosecutions are brought in the name of the state and against an individual, as in State of Arizona v. If the defendant is convicted, and his conviction then is affirmed on appeal in the state supreme court, when he petitions for cert the name of the case becomes Miranda v. There are situations where the Court has original jurisdiction, such as when two states have a dispute against each other, or when there is a dispute between the United States and a state. In such instances, a case is filed with the Supreme Court directly. Examples of such cases include United States v. Texas, a case to determine whether a parcel of land belonged to the United States or to Texas, and Virginia v. Tennessee, a case turning on whether an incorrectly drawn boundary between two states can be changed by a state court, and whether the setting of the correct boundary requires Congressional approval. Although it has not happened since 1794 in the case of Georgia v. Brailsford, [169] parties in an action at law in which the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction may request that a jury determine issues of fact. Brailsford remains the only case in which the court has empaneled a jury, in this case a special jury. [171] Two other original jurisdiction cases involve colonial era borders and rights under navigable waters in New Jersey v. Delaware, and water rights between riparian states upstream of navigable waters in Kansas v. A cert petition is voted on at a session of the court called a conference. A conference is a private meeting of the nine Justices by themselves; the public and the Justices’ clerks are excluded. The rule of four permits four of the nine justices to grant a writ of certiorari. If it is granted, the case proceeds to the briefing stage; otherwise, the case ends. Except in death penalty cases and other cases in which the Court orders briefing from the respondent, the respondent may, but is not required to, file a response to the cert petition. The court grants a petition for cert only for “compelling reasons”, spelled out in the court’s Rule 10. Resolving a conflict in the interpretation of a federal law or a provision of the federal Constitution. Correcting an egregious departure from the accepted and usual course of judicial proceedings. Resolving an important question of federal law, or to expressly review a decision of a lower court that conflicts directly with a previous decision of the Court. When a conflict of interpretations arises from differing interpretations of the same law or constitutional provision issued by different federal circuit courts of appeals, lawyers call this situation a “circuit split”. If the court votes to deny a cert petition, as it does in the vast majority of such petitions that come before it, it does so typically without comment. A denial of a cert petition is not a judgment on the merits of a case, and the decision of the lower court stands as the case’s final ruling. To manage the high volume of cert petitions received by the Court each year (of the more than 7,000 petitions the Court receives each year, it will usually request briefing and hear oral argument in 100 or fewer), the Court employs an internal case management tool known as the “cert pool”. Currently, all justices except for Justices Alito and Gorsuch participate in the cert pool. [172][173][174][175]. A man speaking at a lectern before two supreme court justices. Waxman at oral argument presents his case and answers questions from the justices. When the Court grants a cert petition, the case is set for oral argument. Both parties will file briefs on the merits of the case, as distinct from the reasons they may have argued for granting or denying the cert petition. With the consent of the parties or approval of the Court, amici curiae, or “friends of the court”, may also file briefs. The Court holds two-week oral argument sessions each month from October through April. Each side has thirty minutes to present its argument (the Court may choose to give more time, though this is rare), [176] and during that time, the Justices may interrupt the advocate and ask questions. The petitioner gives the first presentation, and may reserve some time to rebut the respondent’s arguments after the respondent has concluded. Amici curiae may also present oral argument on behalf of one party if that party agrees. The Court advises counsel to assume that the Justices are familiar with and have read the briefs filed in a case. In order to plead before the court, an attorney must first be admitted to the court’s bar. Approximately 4,000 lawyers join the bar each year. The bar contains an estimated 230,000 members. In reality, pleading is limited to several hundred attorneys. Attorneys can be admitted as either individuals or as groups. The group admission is held before the current justices of the Supreme Court, wherein the chief justice approves a motion to admit the new attorneys. [177] Lawyers commonly apply for the cosmetic value of a certificate to display in their office or on their resume. They also receive access to better seating if they wish to attend an oral argument. [178] Members of the Supreme Court Bar are also granted access to the collections of the Supreme Court Library. At the conclusion of oral argument, the case is submitted for decision. Cases are decided by majority vote of the Justices. It is the Court’s practice to issue decisions in all cases argued in a particular term by the end of that term. Within that term, however, the Court is under no obligation to release a decision within any set time after oral argument. After the oral argument is concluded, usually in the same week as the case was submitted, the Justices retire to another conference at which the preliminary votes are tallied and the Court sees which side has prevailed. One of the Justices in the majority is then assigned to write the Court’s opinion-also known as the “majority opinion”. This assignment is made by the most senior Justice in the majority (with the Chief Justice always being considered the most senior). Drafts of the Court’s opinion circulate among the Justices until the Court is prepared to announce the judgment in a particular case. [180] Justices are free to change their votes on a case up until the decision is finalized and published. In any given case, a Justice is free to choose whether or not to author an opinion or else simply join the majority or another Justice’s opinion. There are several primary types of opinions. Opinion of the Court: this is the binding decision of the Supreme Court. An opinion that more than half of the Justices join (usually at least five Justices, since there are nine Justices in total; but in cases where some Justices do not participate it could be fewer) is known as “majority opinion” and creates binding precedent in American law. Whereas an opinion that fewer than half of the Justices join is known as a “plurality opinion” and is only partially binding precedent. Concurring: when a Justice “concurs”, he or she agrees with and joins the majority opinion but authors a separate concurrence to give additional explanations, rationales, or commentary. Concurrences do not create binding precedent. Concurring in the judgment: when a justice “concurs in the judgment”, he or she agrees with the outcome the Court reached but disagrees with its reasons for doing so. A justice in this situation does not join the majority opinion. Like regular concurrences, these do not create binding precedent. Dissent: a dissenting Justice disagrees with the outcome the Court reached and its reasoning. Justices who dissent from a decision may author their own dissenting opinions or, if there are multiple dissenting Justices in a decision, may join another Justice’s dissent. Dissents do not create binding precedent. A justice may also join only part(s) of a particular decision, and may even agree with some parts of the outcome and disagree with others. It is possible that, through recusals or vacancies, the Court divides evenly on a case. If that occurs, then the decision of the court below is affirmed, but does not establish binding precedent. In effect, it results in a return to the status quo ante. For a case to be heard, there must be a quorum of at least six justices. [182] If a quorum is not available to hear a case and a majority of qualified justices believes that the case cannot be heard and determined in the next term, then the judgment of the court below is affirmed as if the Court had been evenly divided. For cases brought to the Supreme Court by direct appeal from a United States District Court, the chief justice may order the case remanded to the appropriate U. Court of Appeals for a final decision there. [183] This has only occurred once in U. History, in the case of United States v. The Court’s opinions are published in three stages. First, a slip opinion is made available on the Court’s web site and through other outlets. Next, several opinions and lists of the court’s orders are bound together in paperback form, called a preliminary print of United States Reports, the official series of books in which the final version of the Court’s opinions appears. About a year after the preliminary prints are issued, a final bound volume of U. The individual volumes of U. Reports are numbered so that users may cite this set of reports (or a competing version published by another commercial legal publisher but containing parallel citations) to allow those who read their pleadings and other briefs to find the cases quickly and easily. As of January 2019, there are. Final bound volumes of U. Reports: 569 volumes, covering cases through June 13, 2013 (part of the October 2012 term). As of March 2012, the U. Reports have published a total of 30,161 Supreme Court opinions, covering the decisions handed down from February 1790 to March 2012. [citation needed] This figure does not reflect the number of cases the Court has taken up, as several cases can be addressed by a single opinion see, for example, Parents v. Seattle, where Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education was also decided in the same opinion; by a similar logic, Miranda v. Arizona actually decided not only Miranda but also three other cases: Vignera v. New York, Westover v. United States, and California v. A more unusual example is The Telephone Cases, which are a single set of interlinked opinions that take up the entire 126th volume of the U. Opinions are also collected and published in two unofficial, parallel reporters: Supreme Court Reporter, published by West (now a part of Thomson Reuters), and United States Supreme Court Reports, Lawyers’ Edition (simply known as Lawyers’ Edition), published by LexisNexis. In court documents, legal periodicals and other legal media, case citations generally contain cites from each of the three reporters; for example, citation to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is presented as Citizens United v. Federal Election Com’n, 585 U. 2d 753 (2010), with S. ” representing the Supreme Court Reporter, and “L. Representing the Lawyers’ Edition. Further information: Case citation § Supreme Court of the United States. Lawyers use an abbreviated format to cite cases, in the form vol U. Page, pin (year), where vol is the volume number, page is the page number on which the opinion begins, and year is the year in which the case was decided. Optionally, pin is used to “pinpoint” to a specific page number within the opinion. For instance, the citation for Roe v. Wade is 410 U. 113 (1973), which means the case was decided in 1973 and appears on page 113 of volume 410 of U. For opinions or orders that have not yet been published in the preliminary print, the volume and page numbers may be replaced with “___”. The Federal court system and the judicial authority to interpret the Constitution received little attention in the debates over the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. The power of judicial review, in fact, is nowhere mentioned in it. Over the ensuing years, the question of whether the power of judicial review was even intended by the drafters of the Constitution was quickly frustrated by the lack of evidence bearing on the question either way. [190] Nevertheless, the power of judiciary to overturn laws and executive actions it determines are unlawful or unconstitutional is a well-established precedent. Many of the Founding Fathers accepted the notion of judicial review; in Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton wrote: A Constitution is, in fact, and must be regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law. It therefore belongs to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; or, in other words, the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute. The Supreme Court firmly established its power to declare laws unconstitutional in Marbury v. Madison (1803), consummating the American system of checks and balances. In explaining the power of judicial review, Chief Justice John Marshall stated that the authority to interpret the law was the particular province of the courts, part of the duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. His contention was not that the Court had privileged insight into constitutional requirements, but that it was the constitutional duty of the judiciary, as well as the other branches of government, to read and obey the dictates of the Constitution. Since the founding of the republic, there has been a tension between the practice of judicial review and the democratic ideals of egalitarianism, self-government, self-determination and freedom of conscience. At one pole are those who view the Federal Judiciary and especially the Supreme Court as being “the most separated and least checked of all branches of government”. [191] Indeed, federal judges and justices on the Supreme Court are not required to stand for election by virtue of their tenure “during good behavior”, and their pay may “not be diminished” while they hold their position (Section 1 of Article Three). Though subject to the process of impeachment, only one Justice has ever been impeached and no Supreme Court Justice has been removed from office. At the other pole are those who view the judiciary as the least dangerous branch, with little ability to resist the exhortations of the other branches of government. The Supreme Court, it is noted, cannot directly enforce its rulings; instead, it relies on respect for the Constitution and for the law for adherence to its judgments. One notable instance of nonacquiescence came in 1832, when the state of Georgia ignored the Supreme Court’s decision in Worcester v. President Andrew Jackson, who sided with the Georgia courts, is supposed to have remarked, John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it! ;[192] however, this alleged quotation has been disputed. [citation needed] Some state governments in the South also resisted the desegregation of public schools after the 1954 judgment Brown v. More recently, many feared that President Nixon would refuse to comply with the Court’s order in United States v. Nixon (1974) to surrender the Watergate tapes. [193][citation needed] Nixon, however, ultimately complied with the Supreme Court’s ruling. Supreme Court decisions can be (and have been) purposefully overturned by constitutional amendment, which has happened on five occasions. Georgia (1793) – overturned by the Eleventh Amendment (1795). Sandford (1857) – overturned by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868). Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895) – overturned by the Sixteenth Amendment (1913). Happersett (1875) – overturned by the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). Mitchell (1970) – overturned by the Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971). When the Court rules on matters involving the interpretation of laws rather than of the Constitution, simple legislative action can reverse the decisions for example, in 2009 Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter act, superseding the limitations given in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. Also, the Supreme Court is not immune from political and institutional consideration: lower federal courts and state courts sometimes resist doctrinal innovations, as do law enforcement officials. In addition, the other two branches can restrain the Court through other mechanisms. Congress can increase the number of justices, giving the President power to influence future decisions by appointments (as in Roosevelt’s Court Packing Plan discussed above). Congress can pass legislation that restricts the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and other federal courts over certain topics and cases: this is suggested by language in Section 2 of Article Three, where the appellate jurisdiction is granted with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. The Court sanctioned such congressional action in the Reconstruction case ex parte McCardle (1869), though it rejected Congress’ power to dictate how particular cases must be decided in United States v. On the other hand, through its power of judicial review, the Supreme Court has defined the scope and nature of the powers and separation between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government; for example, in United States v. (1936), Dames & Moore v. Regan (1981), and notably in Goldwater v. Carter (1979) (where it effectively gave the Presidency the power to terminate ratified treaties without the consent of Congress). The Court’s decisions can also impose limitations on the scope of Executive authority, as in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the Steel Seizure Case (1952), and United States v. Further information: List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States. Each Supreme Court justice hires several law Clerks to review petitions for writ of certiorari, research them, prepare bench memorandums, and draft opinions. Associate justices are allowed four clerks. The chief justice is allowed five clerks, but Chief Justice Rehnquist hired only three per year, and Chief Justice Roberts usually hires only four. [195] Generally, law clerks serve a term of one to two years. The first law clerk was hired by Associate Justice Horace Gray in 1882. [195][196] Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. And Louis Brandeis were the first Supreme Court justices to use recent law school graduates as clerks, rather than hiring a “stenographer-secretary”. [197] Most law clerks are recent law school graduates. The first female clerk was Lucile Lomen, hired in 1944 by Justice William O. [195] The first African-American, William T. Was hired in 1948 by Justice Felix Frankfurter. [195] A disproportionately large number of law clerks have obtained law degrees from elite law schools, especially Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Stanford. From 1882 to 1940, 62% of law clerks were graduates of Harvard Law School. [195] Those chosen to be Supreme Court law clerks usually have graduated in the top of their law school class and were often an editor of the law review or a member of the moot court board. By the mid-1970s, clerking previously for a judge in a federal court of appeals had also become a prerequisite to clerking for a Supreme Court justice. Nine Supreme Court justices previously clerked for other justices: Byron White for Frederick M. Vinson, John Paul Stevens for Wiley Rutledge, William Rehnquist for Robert H. Jackson, Stephen Breyer for Arthur Goldberg, John Roberts for William Rehnquist, Elena Kagan for Thurgood Marshall, Neil Gorsuch for both Byron White and Anthony Kennedy, Brett Kavanaugh also for Kennedy, and Amy Coney Barrett for Antonin Scalia. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh served under Kennedy during the same term. Gorsuch is the first justice to clerk for and subsequently serve alongside the same justice, serving alongside Kennedy from April 2017 through Kennedy’s retirement in 2018. With the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, for the first time a majority of the Supreme Court was composed of former Supreme Court law clerks (Roberts, Breyer, Kagan, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, now joined by Barrett). Several current Supreme Court justices have also clerked in the federal courts of appeals: John Roberts for Judge Henry Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Justice Samuel Alito for Judge Leonard I. Garth of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Elena Kagan for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Neil Gorsuch for Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Brett Kavanaugh for Judge Walter Stapleton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Alex Kozinski of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Amy Coney Barrett for Judge Laurence Silberman of the U. Court of Appeals for the D. Clerks hired by each of the justices of the Supreme Court are often given considerable leeway in the opinions they draft. “Supreme Court clerkship appeared to be a nonpartisan institution from the 1940s into the 1980s, ” according to a study published in 2009 by the law review of Vanderbilt University Law School. [199][200] “As law has moved closer to mere politics, political affiliations have naturally and predictably become proxies for the different political agendas that have been pressed in and through the courts, ” former federal court of appeals judge J. Garrow, professor of history at the University of Cambridge, stated that the Court had thus begun to mirror the political branches of government. “We are getting a composition of the clerk workforce that is getting to be like the House of Representatives, ” Professor Garrow said. Each side is putting forward only ideological purists. According to the Vanderbilt Law Review study, this politicized hiring trend reinforces the impression that the Supreme Court is “a superlegislature responding to ideological arguments rather than a legal institution responding to concerns grounded in the rule of law”. [199] A poll conducted in June 2012 by The New York Times and CBS News showed just 44% of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing. Three-quarters said justices’ decisions are sometimes influenced by their political or personal views. [201] One study, using four-year panel data, found that public opinion of the Supreme Court was highly stable over time. The Supreme Court has been the object of criticisms on a range of issues. The Supreme Court has been criticized for not keeping within Constitutional bounds by engaging in judicial activism, rather than merely interpreting law and exercising judicial restraint. Claims of judicial activism are not confined to any particular ideology. [203] An often cited example of conservative judicial activism is the 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York, which has been criticized by many prominent thinkers, including Robert Bork, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice John Roberts, [203][204] and which was reversed in the 1930s. An often cited example of liberal judicial activism is Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion on the basis of the “right to privacy” inferred from the Fourteenth Amendment, a reasoning that some critics argued was circuitous. [203] Legal scholars, [208][209] justices, [210] and presidential candidates[211] have criticized the Roe decision. The progressive Brown v. Board of Education decision banning racial segregation in public schools has been criticized by conservatives such as Patrick Buchanan, [212] former Associate Justice nominee and Solicitor General Robert Bork[213] and former presidential contender Barry Goldwater. More recently, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was criticized for expanding upon the precedent in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) that the First Amendment applies to corporations, including campaign spending. [215] President Abraham Lincoln warned, referring to the Dred Scott decision, that if government policy became irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court… The people will have ceased to be their own rulers. “[216] Former justice Thurgood Marshall justified judicial activism with these words: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up. During different historical periods, the Court has leaned in different directions. [218][219] Critics from both sides complain that activist judges abandon the Constitution and substitute their own views instead. [220][221][222] Critics include writers such as Andrew Napolitano, [223] Phyllis Schlafly, [224] Mark R. Levin, [225] Mark I. Sutherland, [226] and James MacGregor Burns. [227][228] Past presidents from both parties have attacked judicial activism, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. [229][230] Failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork wrote: What judges have wrought is a coup d’état, – slow-moving and genteel, but a coup d’état nonetheless. “[231] Brian Leiter wrote that “Given the complexity of the law and the complexity involved in saying what really happened in a given dispute, all judges, and especially those on the Supreme Court, often have to exercise a quasi-legislative power, ” and “Supreme Court nominations are controversial because the court is a super-legislature, and because its moral and political judgments are controversial. Court decisions have been criticized for failing to protect individual rights: the Dred Scott (1857) decision upheld slavery;[233] Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) upheld segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal;[234] Kelo v. City of New London (2005) was criticized by prominent politicians, including New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, as undermining property rights. [235][236] Some critics suggest the 2009 bench with a conservative majority has “become increasingly hostile to voters” by siding with Indiana’s voter identification laws which tend to “disenfranchise large numbers of people without driver’s licenses, especially poor and minority voters”, according to one report. [237] Senator Al Franken criticized the Court for “eroding individual rights”. [238] However, others argue that the Court is too protective of some individual rights, particularly those of people accused of crimes or in detention. For example, Chief Justice Warren Burger was an outspoken critic of the exclusionary rule, and Justice Scalia criticized the Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush for being too protective of the rights of Guantanamo detainees, on the grounds that habeas corpus was “limited” to sovereign territory. This criticism is related to complaints about judicial activism. George Will wrote that the Court has an “increasingly central role in American governance”. [240] It was criticized for intervening in bankruptcy proceedings regarding ailing carmaker Chrysler Corporation in 2009. [241] A reporter wrote that “Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s intervention in the Chrysler bankruptcy” left open the “possibility of further judicial review” but argued overall that the intervention was a proper use of Supreme Court power to check the executive branch. Burger, before becoming Chief Justice, argued that since the Supreme Court has such “unreviewable power” it is likely to “self-indulge itself” and unlikely to “engage in dispassionate analysis”. [242] Larry Sabato wrote excessive authority has accrued to the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court. British constitutional scholar Adam Tomkins sees flaws in the American system of having courts (and specifically the Supreme Court) act as checks on the Executive and Legislative branches; he argues that because the courts must wait, sometimes for years, for cases to navigate their way through the system, their ability to restrain other branches is severely weakened. [244][245] In contrast, various other countries have a dedicated constitutional court that has original jurisdiction on constitutional claims brought by persons or political institutions; for example, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, which can declare a law unconstitutional when challenged. There has been debate throughout American history about the boundary between federal and state power. While Framers such as James Madison[246] and Alexander Hamilton[247] argued in The Federalist Papers that their then-proposed Constitution would not infringe on the power of state governments, [248][249][250][251] others argue that expansive federal power is good and consistent with the Framers’ wishes. [252] The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution explicitly grants powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. The Court has been criticized for giving the federal government too much power to interfere with state authority. One criticism is that it has allowed the federal government to misuse the Commerce Clause by upholding regulations and legislation which have little to do with interstate commerce, but that were enacted under the guise of regulating interstate commerce; and by voiding state legislation for allegedly interfering with interstate commerce. For example, the Commerce Clause was used by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the Endangered Species Act, thus protecting six endemic species of insect near Austin, Texas, despite the fact that the insects had no commercial value and did not travel across state lines; the Supreme Court let that ruling stand without comment in 2005. [253] Chief Justice John Marshall asserted Congress’s power over interstate commerce was “complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the Constitution”. [254] Justice Alito said congressional authority under the Commerce Clause is “quite broad”. [255] Modern day theorist Robert B. Reich suggests debate over the Commerce Clause continues today. Advocates of states’ rights such as constitutional scholar Kevin Gutzman have also criticized the Court, saying it has misused the Fourteenth Amendment to undermine state authority. Justice Brandeis, in arguing for allowing the states to operate without federal interference, suggested that states should be laboratories of democracy. [256] One critic wrote the great majority of Supreme Court rulings of unconstitutionality involve state, not federal, law. “[257] However, others see the Fourteenth Amendment as a positive force that extends “protection of those rights and guarantees to the state level. [258] More recently, the issue of federal power is central in the prosecution of Gamble v. United States, which is examining the doctrine of “separate sovereigns”, whereby a criminal defendant can be prosecuted by a state court and then by a federal court. The Court has been criticized for keeping its deliberations hidden from public view. [261] According to a review of Jeffrey Toobin’s 2007 expose The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court; Its inner workings are difficult for reporters to cover, like a closed’cartel’, only revealing itself through’public events and printed releases, with nothing about its inner workings. “[262] The reviewer writes: “few (reporters) dig deeply into court affairs. It all works very neatly; the only ones hurt are the American people, who know little about nine individuals with enormous power over their lives. “[262] Larry Sabato complains about the Court’s “insularity. [243] A Fairleigh Dickinson University poll conducted in 2010 found that 61% of American voters agreed that televising Court hearings would “be good for democracy”, and 50% of voters stated they would watch Court proceedings if they were televised. [263][264] More recently, several justices have appeared on television, written books and made public statements to journalists. [265][266] In a 2009 interview on C-SPAN, journalists Joan Biskupic (of USA Today) and Lyle Denniston (of SCOTUSblog) argued that the Court is a “very open” institution with only the justices’ private conferences inaccessible to others. [265] In October 2010, the Court began the practice of posting on its website recordings and transcripts of oral arguments on the Friday after they occur. Some Court decisions have been criticized for injecting the Court into the political arena, and deciding questions that are the purview of the other two branches of government. Gore decision, in which the Supreme Court intervened in the 2000 presidential election and effectively chose George W. Bush over Al Gore, has been criticized extensively, particularly by liberals. [262][267][268][269][270][271] Another example are Court decisions on apportionment and re-districting: in Baker v. Carr, the court decided it could rule on apportionment questions; Justice Frankfurter in a “scathing dissent” argued against the court wading into so-called political questions. Senator Arlen Specter said the Court should “decide more cases”. [238] On the other hand, although Justice Scalia acknowledged in a 2009 interview that the number of cases that the Court heard then was smaller than when he first joined the Supreme Court, he also stated that he had not changed his standards for deciding whether to review a case, nor did he believe his colleagues had changed their standards. He attributed the high volume of cases in the late 1980s, at least in part, to an earlier flurry of new federal legislation that was making its way through the courts. Critic Larry Sabato wrote: The insularity of lifetime tenure, combined with the appointments of relatively young attorneys who give long service on the bench, produces senior judges representing the views of past generations better than views of the current day. [243] Sanford Levinson has been critical of justices who stayed in office despite medical deterioration based on longevity. [273] James MacGregor Burns stated lifelong tenure has “produced a critical time lag, with the Supreme Court institutionally almost always behind the times”. [227] Proposals to solve these problems include term limits for justices, as proposed by Levinson[274] and Sabato[243][275] as well as a mandatory retirement age proposed by Richard Epstein, [276] among others. [277] However, others suggest lifetime tenure brings substantial benefits, such as impartiality and freedom from political pressure. Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78 wrote nothing can contribute so much to its firmness and independence as permanency in office. The 21st century has seen increased scrutiny of justices accepting expensive gifts and travel. All of the members of the Roberts Court have accepted travel or gifts. [280] Justice Scalia and others took dozens of expensive trips to exotic locations paid for by private donors. [281] Private events sponsored by partisan groups that are attended by both the justices and those who have an interest in their decisions have raised concerns about access and inappropriate communications. [282] Stephen Spaulding, the legal director at Common Cause, said: There are fair questions raised by some of these trips about their commitment to being impartial. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Autographs\Political\Other Political Autographs”. The seller is “memorabilia111″ and is located in this country: US. This item can be shipped to United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Estonia, Australia, Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Slovenia, Japan, China, Sweden, Korea, South, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Africa, Thailand, Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Bahamas, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Croatia, Republic of, Malaysia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands, Barbados, Bangladesh, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bolivia, Ecuador, Egypt, French Guiana, Guernsey, Gibraltar, Guadeloupe, Iceland, Jersey, Jordan, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, Sri Lanka, Luxembourg, Monaco, Macau, Martinique, Maldives, Nicaragua, Oman, Peru, Pakistan, Paraguay, Reunion, Vietnam, Uruguay.
Supreme Court Signed Check William Day Autograph 1880

Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed

supreme
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed

Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL AUTOGRAPH BEAUTIFULLY MATTED 11X14 INCHES AND PROTECTED IN PLASTIC OF SUPREME COURT JJSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES CHARLES E. HUGHES WHICH COME WITH THE ORIGINAL MAILING ENVELOPE FROM 1931 AND A PORTRAIT OF CHARLES E. Charles Evans Hughes Sr. Was an American statesman, politician and jurist who served as the 11th Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. Nicknamed the “roving Justices, ” new Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts sometimes joined the “four horsemen”-Justices George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, James C. McReynolds, and Willis Van Devanter–sometimes joined three Judges more willing to accept laws however meddlesome. These three were Louis D. Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone, and Oliver Wendell Holmes until he retired in 1932. Cardozo succeeded him, and often voted with Brandeis and Stone. In 1925, while the Court was deciding the Benjamin Gitlow case, Minnesota legislators were passing a new statute. It provided that a court order could silence, as “public nuisances, ” periodicals that published “malicious, scandalous, and defamatory” material. “Unfortunately we are both former editors of a local scandal sheet, a distinction we regret, ” conceded J. Near and his partner in the first issue of the Saturday Press, but they promised to fight crime in Minneapolis. They called the police chief a “cuddler of criminals” who protected rat gamblers. They abused the county attorney, who sued Near; the state’s highest court ordered the paper suppressed. Citing the Schenck and Gitlow decisions, Near’s lawyer appealed to the Supreme Court, which struck down the state law in 1931. For four dissenters, Pierce Butler quoted with evident distaste Near’s outbursts at “snake-faced” Jewish gangsters; peace and order need legal protection from such publishers, Butler insisted. For the majority, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes analyzed this “unusual, if not unique” law. If anyone published something “scandalous” a Minnesota court might close his paper permanently for damaging public morals. But charges of corruption in office always make public scandals, Hughes pointed out. Anyone defamed in print may sue for libel, he added emphatically. However disgusting Near’s words, said Hughes, the words of the Constitution controlled the decision, and they demand a free press without censorship. Criticism may offend public officials, it may even remove them from office; but trashy or trenchant, the press may not be suppressed by law. How citizens use liberty has confronted the Justices again and again, in cases of violence as well as scandal. Alabama militia had machine guns on the courthouse roof, said newspaper reports from Scottsboro; mobs had a band playing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”; and amid the clamor, nine black youths waited behind bars for trial on charges of raping two white women. Across the Alabama line, white and black hoboes on board got into a fight; some jumped and some were thrown from the train. Alerted by telephone, a sheriff’s posse stopped the train, arrested the nine Negroes still on it, and took them to jail in the Jackson County seat, Scottsboro. Then Victoria Price claimed they had raped her and Ruby Bates. Doctors found no proof of this story, but a frenzied crowd gathered swiftly. Ten thousand people, many armed, were there a week later when the nine went on trial. Because state law provided a death penalty, it required the court to appoint one or two defense lawyers. At the arraignment, the judge told all seven members of the county bar to serve. In three trials, completed in three days, jurors found eight defendants guilty; they could not agree on Roy Wright, one of the youngest. The eight were sentenced to death. Of these nine, the oldest might have reached 21; one was crippled, one nearly blind; each signed his name by “X”-his mark. All swore they were innocent. On appeal, Alabama’s highest court ordered a new hearing for one of the nine, Eugene Williams; but it upheld the other proceedings. When a petition in the name of Ozie Powell reached the Supreme Court, seven Justices agreed that no lawyer had helped the defendants at the trials. Justice George Sutherland wrote the Court’s opinion. Facing a possible death sentence, unable to hire a lawyer, too young or ignorant or dull to defend himself-such a defendant has a constitutional right to counsel, and his counsel must fight for him, Sutherland said. Sent back for retrial, the cases went on. Alabama reached the Supreme Court in 1935; Chief Justice Hughes ruled that because qualified Negroes did not serve on jury duty in those counties, the trials had been unconstitutional. We still have the right to secede! Retorted one southern official. Again the prisoners stood trial. Alabama dropped rape charges against some; others were conflicted but later paroled; one escaped. The Supreme Court’s rulings stood-if a defendant lacks a lawyer and a fairly chosen jury, the Constitution can help him. The Scottsboro Boys in 1937. And the Constitution forbids any state’s prosecuting attorneys to use evidence they know is false; the Court announced this in 1935, when Tom Mooney had spent nearly 20 years behind the bars of a California prison. To rally support for a stronger Army and Navy, San Franciscans had organized a huge parade for “Preparedness Day, ” July 22, 1916. As the marchers set out, a bomb exploded: 10 victims died, 40 were injured. Mooney, known as a friend of anarchists and a labor radical, was convicted of first-degree murder; soon it appeared that the chief witness against him had lied under oath. President Wilson persuaded the Governor of California to commute the death sentence to life imprisonment. For years labor called Mooney a martyr to injustice. Finally Mooney’s lawyers applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus, and won a new ruling-if a state uses perjured witnesses, knowing that they lie, it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process of law; it must provide ways to set aside such tainted convictions. The case went back to the state. In 1939 Governor Culbert Olson granted Mooney a pardon; free, he was almost forgotten. When the stock market collapsed in 1929 and the American economy headed toward ruin, President Hoover had called for emergency measures. The states tried to cope with the general disaster. Before long, cases on their new laws began to reach the Supreme Court. Roosevelt won the 1932 Presidential election, and by June 1933, Congress had passed 15 major laws for national remedies. Grocer Leo Nebbia, who violated the New York Milk Control Board’s order to fix prices of milk in order to stabilize the market. Agitator and Martyr for Labor, Tom Mooney leaves San Quentin in 1939. Almost 20,000,000 people depended on federal relief by 1934, when the Supreme Court decided the case of Leo Nebbia. Justice Owen Roberts wrote the majority opinion, upholding the New York law; he went beyond the 1887 decision in the Granger cases to declare that a state may regulate any business whatever when the public good requires it. The “four horsemen” dissented; but Roosevelt’s New Dealers began to hope their economic program might win the Supreme Court’s approval after all. Considering a New Deal law for the first time, in January 1935, the Court held that one part of the National Industrial Recovery Act gave the President too much lawmaking power. The Court did sustain the policy of reducing the dollar’s value in gold. But a five-to-four decision in May made a railroad pension law unconstitutional. Then all nine Justices vetoed a law to relieve farm debtors, and killed the National Recovery Administration; FDR denounced their “horse-and-buggy” definition of interstate commerce. While the Court moved into its splendid new building, criticism of its decisions grew sharper and angrier. The whole federal judiciary came under attack as district courts issued-over a two-year period-some 1,600 injunctions to keep Acts of Congress from being enforced. But the Court seemed to ignore the clamor. Farming lay outside Congressional power, said six Justices in 1936; they called the Agricultural Adjustment Act invalid for dealing with state problems. Brandeis and Cardozo joined Stone in a scathing dissent: Courts are not the only agency. That must be assumed to have capacity to govern. But two decisions that followed denied power to both the federal and the state governments. In a law to strengthen the chaotic soft-coal industry and help the almost starving miners, Congress had dealt with prices in one section, with working conditions and wages in another. If the courts held one section invalid, the other might survive. When a test case came up, seven coal-mining states urged the Court to uphold the Act, but five Justices called the whole law unconstitutional for trying to cure “local evils”-state problems. Then they threw out a New York law that set minimum wages for women and children; they said states could not regulate matters of individual liberty. By forbidding Congress and the states to act, Justice Harlan F. Stone confided bitterly to his sister, the Court had apparently tied Uncle Sam up in a hard knot. Tortured and whipped by deputy sheriffs, three men confessed to murder; in 1936 the Supreme Court found that their state, Mississippi, had denied them due process of law. That November Roosevelt won reelection by a margin of ten million votes; Democrats won more than three-fourths of the seats in Congress. The people had spoken. Yet the laws their representatives passed might stand or fall by five or six votes in the Supreme Court. Roosevelt, aware that Congress had changed the number of Justices six times since 1789, sent a plan for court reform to the Senate on February 5, 1937. Emphasizing the limited vision of “older men, ” Roosevelt asked Congress for power to name an additional Justice when one aged 70 did not resign, until the Court should have 15 members. Six were already over 70; Louis D. Roosevelt said the Court needed help to keep up with its work. Even staunch New Dealers boggled at this plan; it incurred criticism as sharp as any the Court had ever provoked. Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes calmly pointed out that the Court was keeping up with its work. And in angry editorials and thousands of letters to Congress the public protested the very idea of “packing” the Court. This 1937 steel strike occured in Pittsburgh following the Supreme Court’s decision to order union employees fired from their jobs at Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation reinstated. President Roosevelt’s attempt to add more Justices to the Court in 1937 met with defeat. Before the President revealed his plan, five Justices had already voted to sustain a state minimum-wage law in a case from Washington; on March 29, the Court announced that the law was constitutional. On April 12, Chief Justice Hughes read the majority opinion in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation. It upheld the Wagner Act, the first federal law to regulate disputes between capital and labor. Hughes gave interstate commerce a definition broader than the Jones & Laughlin domain-mines in Minnesota, quarries in West Virginia, steamships on the Great Lakes. Although the case turned on a union dispute at one plant in Pennsylvania, he said, a company-wide dispute would paralyze interstate commerce. Congress could prevent such evils and protect union rights. Under these two rulings, Congress and the states were free to exercise powers the Court had denied just a year before. Stubbornly the “four horsemen” dissented. But Willis Van Devanter announced that he would retire. By autumn the fight over the Court was a thing of the past. As Lincoln said in 1861, the people would rule themselves; they would decide vital questions of national policy. But, as firmly as Lincoln himself, they disclaimed any assault upon the Court. In one of the Supreme Court’s greatest crises, the people chose to sustain its power and dignity. Decisions changed dramatically in the “constitutional revolutions” of 1937. So did the Court when President Roosevelt made appointments at last. In 1937 he named Senator Hugo L. Black; in 1938, Solicitor General Stanley Reed; in 1939, Felix Frankfurter and William O. New problems tested the Court as it was defining civil liberties. Danger from abroad made the case for patriotism and freedom in America more urgent; in the “blood purge” of 1934, Adolf Hitler had announced, I became the supreme judge of the German people. Under God’s law, the Commandments in the Book of Exodus, members of Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to salute a flag. When Lillian and William Gobitas (misspelled “Gobitis” in the record), aged 12 and 10 in 1935, refused to join classmates in saluting the Stars and Stripes, the Board of Education in Minersville, Pennsylvania, decided to expel them for insubordination. With help from other Jehovah’s Witnesses and the American Civil Liberties Union, their father sought relief in the federal courts. The district court and the circuit court of appeals granted it. In 1940 the school board turned to the Supreme Court. Considering the right of local authorities to settle local problems, eight Justices voted to uphold the school board’s secular regulation. Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote the majority opinion. He told Justice Stone that his private idea “of liberty and toleration and good sense” favored the Gobitas family, but he believed that judges should defer to the actions of the people’s elected representatives. Hitler’s armies had stabbed into France when Frankfurter announced the Court’s ruling on June 3, 1940; Stone read his dissent with obvious emotion, insisting that the Constitution must preserve freedom of mind and spirit. Law reviews criticized the Court for setting aside the issue of religious freedom. Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered violent attacks around the country; many states expelled children from school for not saluting the flag. In 1940, Attorney General Frank Murphy came to the bench; Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, in 1941. When Hughes retired that year, Roosevelt made Harlan Fiske Stone Chief Justice and gave his seat as Associate to Attorney General Robert H. How the “new Court” would meet old problems soon became clear. Charles Evans Hughes was born and raised in New York. He was educated by his parents but matriculated at Madison College (now Colgate) when he was fourteen. He completed his undergraduate education at Brown. Hughes taught briefly before entering Columbia Law School. He scored an amazing 99 1/2 on his bar exam at the age of 22. He practiced law in New York for 20 years, though he did hold an appointment at Cornell Law School for a few years in that period. With an endorsement from Theodore Roosevelt, Hughes ran successfully for New York governor, defeating Democrat William Randolph Hearst in 1906. In 1910, Hughes accepted nomination to the High Court from President Taft. Six years later, Hughes resigned to run against Woodrow Wilson for the presidency as the nominee of the Republican and Progressive Parties. He lost by a mere 23 electoral votes. After a brief stint in private practice, Hughes was called to politics again, this time as secretary of state for Warren G. Hughes continued in this role during the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Hughes’s nomination to be chief justice met with opposition from Democrats who viewed Hughes as too closely aligned with corporate America. Their opposition was insufficient to deny Hughes the center chair, however. Hughes authored twice as many constitutional opinions as any other member of his Court. His opinions, in the view of one commentator, were concise and admirable, placing Hughes in the pantheon of great justices. Hughes had remarkable intellectual and social gifts that made him a superb leader and administrator. He had a photographic memory that few, if any, of his colleagues could match. Yet he was generous, kind, and forebearing in an institution where egos generally come in only one size: extra large! The chief justice of the United States[1][2] is the chief judge of the Supreme Court of the United States and the highest-ranking officer of the U. Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the U. Constitution grants plenary power to the president of the United States to nominate, and with the advice and consent of the United States Senate, appoint “Judges of the supreme Court”, who serve until they resign, retire, are impeached and convicted, or die. The existence of a chief justice is explicit in Article One, Section 3, Clause 6 which states that the chief justice shall preside on the impeachment trial of the president. The chief justice has significant influence in the selection of cases for review, presides when oral arguments are held, and leads the discussion of cases among the justices. Additionally, when the court renders an opinion, the chief justice, if in the majority, chooses who writes the court’s opinion. When deciding a case, however, the chief justice’s vote counts no more than that of any other justice. Article I, Section 3, Clause 6 designates the chief justice to preside during presidential impeachment trials in the Senate; this has occurred three times. While nowhere mandated, the presidential oath of office is by tradition typically administered by the chief justice. The chief justice serves as a spokesperson for the federal government’s judicial branch and acts as a chief administrative officer for the federal courts. The chief justice presides over the Judicial Conference and, in that capacity, appoints the director and deputy director of the Administrative Office. The chief justice is an ex officio member of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution and, by custom, is elected chancellor of the board. The current chief justice is John Roberts (since 2005). Five of the 17 chief justices-John Rutledge, Edward Douglass White, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan Fiske Stone, and William Rehnquist-served as associate justice prior to becoming chief justice. Origin, title, and appointment. List of chief justices. The United States Constitution does not explicitly establish an office of chief justice but presupposes its existence with a single reference in Article I, Section 3, Clause 6: When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside. Nothing more is said in the Constitution regarding the office. Article III, Section 1, which authorizes the establishment of the Supreme Court, refers to all members of the court simply as “judges”. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created the distinctive titles of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1866, Salmon P. Chase assumed the title of Chief Justice of the United States, and Congress began using the new title in subsequent legislation. [2] The first person whose Supreme Court commission contained the modified title was Melville Fuller in 1888. [3] The associate justice title was not altered in 1866 and remains as originally created. The chief justice, like all federal judges, is nominated by the president and confirmed to office by the U. Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution specifies that they shall hold their Offices during good Behavior. This language means that the appointments are effectively for life and that once in office, a justice’s tenure ends only when the justice dies, retires, resigns, or is removed from office through the impeachment process. Since 1789, 15 presidents have made a total of 22 official nominations to the position. [5] The practice of appointing an individual to serve as chief justice is grounded in tradition; while the Constitution mandates that there be a chief justice, it is silent on the subject of how one is chosen and by whom. There is no specific constitutional prohibition against using another method to select the chief justice from among those justices properly appointed and confirmed to the Supreme Court. Three incumbent associate justices have been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate as chief justice: Edward Douglass White in 1910, Harlan Fiske Stone in 1941, and William Rehnquist in 1986. A fourth, Abe Fortas, was nominated to the position in 1968 but was not confirmed. As an associate justice does not have to resign his or her seat on the court in order to be nominated as chief justice, Fortas remained an associate justice. Similarly, when Associate Justice William Cushing was nominated and confirmed as chief justice in January 1796 but declined the office, he too remained on the court. John Rutledge was the first. President Washington gave him a recess appointment in 1795. However, his subsequent nomination to the office was not confirmed by the Senate, and he left office and the court. In 1930, former Associate Justice Charles Evans Hughes was confirmed as chief justice. Additionally, in December 1800, former Chief Justice John Jay was nominated and confirmed to the position a second time but ultimately declined it, opening the way for the appointment of John Marshall. Article I, Section 3 of the U. Constitution stipulates that the chief justice shall preside over the Senate trial of an impeached president of the United States. Three chief justices have presided over presidential impeachment trials: Salmon P. Chase (1868 trial of Andrew Johnson), William Rehnquist (1999 trial of Bill Clinton), and John Roberts (2020 trial of Donald Trump). All three presidents were acquitted in the Senate. Although the Constitution is silent on the matter, the chief justice would, under Senate rules adopted in 1999 prior to the Clinton trial, preside over the trial of an impeached vice president. [6][7] This rule was established to preclude the possibility of a vice president presiding over their own trial. Many of the court’s procedures and inner workings are governed by the rules of protocol based on the seniority of the justices. The chief justice always ranks first in the order of precedence-regardless of the length of the officeholder’s service (even if shorter than that of one or more associate justices). This elevated status has enabled successive chief justices to define and refine both the court’s culture and its judicial priorities. The chief justice sets the agenda for the weekly meetings where the justices review the petitions for certiorari, to decide whether to hear or deny each case. The Supreme Court agrees to hear less than one percent of the cases petitioned to it. While associate justices may append items to the weekly agenda, in practice this initial agenda-setting power of the chief justice has significant influence over the direction of the court. Nonetheless, a chief justice’s influence may be limited by circumstances and the associate justices’ understanding of legal principles; it is definitely limited by the fact that he has only a single vote of nine on the decision whether to grant or deny certiorari. Despite the chief justice’s elevated stature, his vote carries the same legal weight as the vote of each associate justice. Additionally, he has no legal authority to overrule the verdicts or interpretations of the other eight judges or tamper with them. [8] The task of assigning who shall write the opinion for the majority falls to the most senior justice in the majority. Thus, when the chief justice is in the majority, he always assigns the opinion. [10] Early in his tenure, Chief Justice John Marshall insisted upon holdings which the justices could unanimously back as a means to establish and build the court’s national prestige. In doing so, Marshall would often write the opinions himself and actively discouraged dissenting opinions. Associate Justice William Johnson eventually persuaded Marshall and the rest of the court to adopt its present practice: one justice writes an opinion for the majority, and the rest are free to write their own separate opinions or not, whether concurring or dissenting. The chief justice’s formal prerogative-when in the majority-to assign which justice will write the court’s opinion is perhaps his most influential power, [9] as this enables him to influence the historical record. [8] He may assign this task to the individual justice best able to hold together a fragile coalition, to an ideologically amenable colleague, or to himself. Opinion authors can have a large influence on the content of an opinion; two justices in the same majority, given the opportunity, might write very different majority opinions. [9] A chief justice who knows the associate justices well can therefore do much-by the simple act of selecting the justice who writes the opinion of the court-to affect the general character or tone of an opinion, which in turn can affect the interpretation of that opinion in cases before lower courts in the years to come. The chief justice chairs the conferences where cases are discussed and tentatively voted on by the justices. He normally speaks first and so has influence in framing the discussion. Although the chief justice votes first-the court votes in order of seniority-he may strategically pass in order to ensure membership in the majority if desired. [9] It is reported that. Chief Justice Warren Burger was renowned, and even vilified in some quarters, for voting strategically during conference discussions on the Supreme Court in order to control the Court’s agenda through opinion assignment. Indeed, Burger is said to have often changed votes to join the majority coalition, cast “phony votes” by voting against his preferred position, and declined to express a position at conference. The chief justice has traditionally administered the presidential oath of office to new U. This is merely custom, and is not a constitutional responsibility of the chief justice. The Constitution does not require that the presidential oath be administered by anyone in particular, simply that it be taken by the president. Law empowers any federal or state judge, as well as notaries public, to administer oaths and affirmations. The chief justice ordinarily administers the oath of office to newly appointed and confirmed associate justices, whereas the seniormost associate justice will normally swear in a new chief justice. If the chief justice is ill or incapacitated, the oath is usually administered by the seniormost member of the Supreme Court. Seven times, someone other than the chief justice of the United States administered the oath of office to the president. [13] Robert Livingston, as chancellor of the state of New York (the state’s highest ranking judicial office), administered the oath of office to George Washington at his first inauguration; there was no chief justice of the United States, nor any other federal judge prior to their appointments by President Washington in the months following his inauguration. William Cushing, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, administered Washington’s second oath of office in 1793. Calvin Coolidge’s father, a notary public, administered the oath to his son after the death of Warren Harding. [14] This, however, was contested upon Coolidge’s return to Washington, and his oath was re-administered by Judge Adolph A. District Court for the District of Columbia. [15] John Tyler and Millard Fillmore were both sworn in on the death of their predecessors by Chief Judge William Cranch of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia. Arthur and Theodore Roosevelt’s initial oaths reflected the unexpected nature of their taking office. On November 22, 1963, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, a federal district court judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, administered the oath of office to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson aboard the presidential airplane. Since the tenure of William Howard Taft, the office of chief justice has moved beyond just first among equals. [17] The chief justice also. Serves as the head of the federal judiciary. Serves as the head of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the chief administrative body of the United States federal courts. The Judicial Conference is empowered by the Rules Enabling Act to propose rules, which are then promulgated by the Supreme Court (subject to disapproval by Congress under the Congressional Review Act), to ensure the smooth operation of the federal courts. Major portions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Federal Rules of Evidence have been adopted by most state legislatures and are considered canonical by American law schools. Appoints sitting federal judges to the membership of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a “secret court” which oversees requests for surveillance warrants by federal police agencies (primarily the FBI) against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States. Appoints sitting federal judges to the membership of the United States Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a special court constituted to determine whether aliens should be deported from the United States on the grounds that they are terrorists. Appoints the members of the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, a special tribunal of seven sitting federal judges responsible for selecting the venue for coordinated pretrial proceedings in situations where multiple related federal actions have been filed in different judicial districts. Serves as an ex officio member of the Board of Regents and as the chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution. Supervises the acquisition of books for the Law Library of the Library of Congress. Unlike Senators and Representatives, who are constitutionally prohibited from holding any other “office of trust or profit” of the United States or of any state while holding their congressional seats, the chief justice and the other members of the federal judiciary are not barred from serving in other positions. John Jay served as a diplomat to negotiate the Jay Treaty, Robert H. Jackson was appointed by President Truman to be the U. Prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis, and Earl Warren chaired the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. [20] Currently, Clarence Thomas is the most senior associate justice. Since the Supreme Court was established in 1789, the following 17 men have served as chief justice:[21][22]. 5 years, 253 days. United States Secretary of State. John Rutledge color painting. August 12, 1795[d]. (Resigned, nomination having been rejected). Chief Justice of the. South Carolina Court of. Common Pleas and Sessions. Of the Supreme Court. 4 years, 282 days. 34 years, 152 days. 28 years, 198 days. 8 years, 143 days. 14 years, 19 days. 21 years, 269 days. Illinois State Bar Association. December 12, 1910[e]. 10 years, 151 days. 8 years, 207 days. President of the United States. 11 years, 126 days. June 27, 1941[e]. 4 years, 293 days. 7 years, 76 days. October 5, 1953[d]. 15 years, 261 days. 17 years, 95 days. United States Court of Appeals. For the District of Columbia Circuit. September 17, 1986[e]. 18 years, 342 days. 15 years, 270 days. (April 11, 1862 – August 27, 1948) was an American statesman, politician and jurist who served as the 11th Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. A member of the Republican Party, he was also the 36th Governor of New York, the Republican nominee for president of the United States in the 1916 presidential election, and the 44th United States Secretary of State. Born to a Welsh immigrant preacher and his wife in Glens Falls, New York, Hughes graduated from Brown University and Columbia Law School and practiced law in New York City. He won election as the Governor of New York in 1906, and implemented several progressive reforms. In 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed Hughes as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. During his tenure on the Supreme Court, Hughes often joined Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In voting to uphold state and federal regulations. Hughes served as an Associate Justice until 1916, when he resigned from the bench to accept the Republican presidential nomination. Though Hughes was widely viewed as the favorite in the race against incumbent Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, Wilson won a narrow victory. Harding won the 1920 presidential election, Hughes accepted Harding’s invitation to serve as Secretary of State. Serving under Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he negotiated the Washington Naval Treaty, which was designed to prevent a naval arms race among the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover appointed him to succeed Chief Justice Taft. Along with Associate Justice Owen Roberts, Hughes emerged as a key swing vote on the bench, positioned between the liberal Three Musketeers and the conservative Four Horsemen. The Hughes Court struck down several New Deal programs in the early and the mid-1930s, but 1937 marked a turning point for the Supreme Court and the New Deal as Hughes and Roberts joined with the Three Musketeers to uphold the Wagner Act and a state minimum wage law. That same year saw the defeat of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have expanded the size of the Supreme Court. Hughes served until 1941, when he retired and was succeeded by Associate Justice Harlan F. Early life and family. Legal and academic career. Governor of New York. Return to private practice. Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. Hughes at the age of 16. Hughes’s father, David Charles Hughes, immigrated to the United States from Wales in 1855 after he was inspired by The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. David became a Baptist preacher in Glens Falls, New York, and married Mary Catherine Connelly, whose family had been in the United States for several generations. [2] Charles Evans Hughes, the only child of David and Mary, was born in Glens Falls on April 11, 1862. [3][4] The Hughes family moved to Oswego, New York, in 1866, but relocated soon after to Newark, New Jersey, and then to Brooklyn. With the exception of a brief period of attendance at Newark High School, Hughes received no formal education until 1874, instead being educated by his parents. In September 1874, he enrolled in New York City’s prestigious Public School 35, graduating the following year. At the age of 14, Hughes attended Madison University (now Colgate University) for two years before transferring to Brown University. He graduated from Brown third in his class at the age of 19, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. He was also a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity, where he would serve as the first international President later on. [6] During his time at Brown, Hughes volunteered for the successful presidential campaign of Republican nominee James A. Garfield, a brother of his in Delta Upsilon where Garfield was an undergraduate at Williams College, and served as the editor of the college newspaper. After graduating from Brown, Hughes spent a year working as a teacher in Delhi, New York. [7] He next enrolled in Columbia Law School, where he graduated first in his class in 1884. [6] That same year, he passed the New York bar exam with the highest score ever awarded by the state. In 1888, Hughes married Antoinette Carter, the daughter of the senior partner of the law firm where he worked. Their first child, Charles Evans Hughes Jr. [9] Hughes and his wife would have one son and three daughters. [10] Their youngest child, Elizabeth Hughes, was one of the first humans injected with insulin, and later served as president of the Supreme Court Historical Society. Hughes with his wife and children, c. ? Hughes took a position with the Wall Street law firm of Chamberlain, Carter & Hornblower in 1883, focusing primarily on matters related to contracts and bankruptcies. He was made a partner in the firm in 1888, and the firm changed its name to Carter, Hughes & Cravath (it later became known as Hughes Hubbard & Reed). Hughes left the firm and became a professor at Cornell Law School from 1891 to 1893. [12] He also joined the board of Brown University and served on a special committee that recommended revisions to New York’s Code of Civil Procedure. Responding to newspaper stories run by the New York World, Governor Frank W. Higgins appointed a legislative committee to investigate the state’s public utilities in 1905. On the recommendation of a former state judge who had been impressed by Hughes’s performance in court, the legislative committee appointed Hughes to lead the investigation. Hughes was reluctant to take on the powerful utility companies, but Senator Frederick C. Stevens, the leader of the committee, convinced Hughes to accept the position. Hughes decided to center his investigation on Consolidated Gas, which controlled the production and sale of gas in New York City. To eliminate or mitigate those abuses, Hughes drafted and convinced the state legislature to pass bills that established a commission to regulate public utilities and lowered gas prices. Seeking to remove Hughes from the investigation, Republican leaders nominated him as the party’s candidate for Mayor of New York City, but Hughes refused the nomination. Gubernatorial portrait of Charles Evans Hughes. Seeking a strong candidate to defeat newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst in the 1906 New York gubernatorial election, President Theodore Roosevelt convinced New York Republican leaders to nominate Hughes for governor. Roosevelt described Hughes as a sane and sincere reformer, who really has fought against the very evils which Hearst denounces… [but is] free from any taint of demagogy. [18] In his campaign for governor, Hughes attacked the corruption of specific companies but defended corporations as a necessary part of the economy. He also called for an eight-hour workday on public works projects and favored prohibitions on child labor. [19] Hughes was not a charismatic speaker, but he campaigned vigorously throughout the state and won the endorsements of most newspapers. [20] Ultimately, Hughes defeated Hearst in a close election, taking 52 percent of the vote. Hughes’s governorship focused largely on reforming the government and addressing political corruption. He expanded the number of civil service positions, increased the power of the public utility regulatory commissions, and won passage of laws that placed limits on political donations by corporations and required political candidates to track campaign receipts and expenditures. [21] He also signed laws that barred younger workers from several dangerous occupations and established a maximum 48-hour workweek for manufacturing workers under the age of 16. To enforce those laws, Hughes reorganized the New York State Department of Labor. Hughes’s labor policies were influenced by economist Richard T. Ely, who sought to improve working conditions for laborers, but rejected the more far-reaching reforms favored by union leaders like Samuel Gompers. Despite his busyness as New York governor, Hughes found time to get involved in religious matters. A lifelong Baptist, he participated in the creation of the Northern Baptist Convention in May 1907. Hughes served the convention as its first president, beginning the task of unifying the thousands of independent Baptist churches across the North into one denomination. Previously, northern Baptists had only connected between local churches through missions societies and benevolent causes. The Northern Baptist Convention would go on to become the historical important American Baptist Churches USA, which made this aspect of Hughes’ life during his governorship a key part of his historical influence. However, Hughes’ political role was changing. He had previously been close with Roosevelt, but relations between Hughes and the president cooled after a dispute over a minor federal appointment. [25] Roosevelt chose not to seek re-election in 1908, instead endorsing Secretary of War William Howard Taft as his preferred successor. Taft won the Republican presidential nomination and asked Hughes to serve as his running mate, but Hughes declined the offer. Hughes also considered retiring from the governorship, but Taft and Roosevelt convinced him to seek a second term. Despite having little support among some of the more conservative leaders of the state party, Hughes won re-election in the 1908 election. Hughes’s second term proved to be less successful than his first, but he increased regulation over telephone and telegraph companies and won passage of the first workers’ compensation bill in U. See also: White Court (judges). Hughes struck up a close friendship with Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. By early 1910, Hughes was anxious to retire from his position as governor. [27] A vacancy on the Supreme Court arose following the death of Associate Justice David J. Brewer, and Taft offered the position to Hughes. Hughes quickly accepted the offer, and he was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on May 2, 1910. [27] Two months after Hughes’ confirmation, but prior to his taking the judicial oath, Chief Justice Melville Fuller died. Taft elevated Associate Justice Edward Douglass White to the position of Chief Justice despite having previously indicated to Hughes that he might select Hughes as Chief Justice. White’s candidacy for the position was bolstered by his long experience on the bench and popularity among his fellow justices, as well as Theodore Roosevelt’s coolness towards Hughes. Taft nominated Willis Van Devanter to succeed White as associate justice. Hughes, who was sworn into office on October 10, 1910, [1] quickly struck up friendships with other members of the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice White, Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, and Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. [29] In the disposition of cases, however, Hughes tended to align with Holmes. He voted to uphold state laws providing for minimum wages, workmen’s compensation, and maximum work hours for women and children. [30] He also wrote several opinions upholding the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce under the Commerce Clause. His majority opinion in Baltimore & Ohio Railroad vs. Interstate Commerce Commission upheld the right of the federal government to regulate the hours of railroad workers. [31] His majority opinion in the 1914 Shreveport Rate Case upheld the Interstate Commerce Commission’s decision to void discriminatory railroad rates imposed by the Railroad Commission of Texas. The decision established that the federal government could regulate intrastate commerce when it affected interstate commerce, though Hughes avoided directly overruling the 1895 case of United States v. He also wrote a series of opinions that upheld civil liberties; in one such case, McCabe v. Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Co. Hughes’s majority opinion required railroad carriers to give African-Americans equal treatment. [33] Hughes’s majority opinion in Bailey v. Alabama invalidated a state law that had made it a crime for a laborer to fail to complete obligations agreed to in a labor contract. Hughes held that this law violated the Thirteenth Amendment and discriminated against African-American workers. [31] He also joined the majority decision in the 1915 case of Guinn v. United States, which outlawed the use of grandfather clauses to determine voter enfranchisement. [34] Hughes and Holmes were the only dissenters from the court’s ruling that affirmed a lower court’s decision to withhold a writ of habeas corpus from Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager convicted of murder in the state of Georgia. Further information: 1916 United States presidential election. Hughes in Winona, Minnesota, during the 1916 presidential campaign campaigning on the Olympian. Taft and Roosevelt endured a bitter split during Taft’s presidency, and Roosevelt challenged Taft for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination. Taft won re-nomination, but Roosevelt ran on the ticket of a third party, the Progressive Party. [36] With the split in the Republican Party, Democratic Governor Woodrow Wilson defeated Taft and Roosevelt in the 1912 presidential election and enacted his progressive New Freedom agenda. [37] Seeking to bridge the divide in the Republican Party and limit Wilson to a single term, several Republican leaders asked Hughes to consider running in the 1916 presidential election. Hughes at first rebuffed those entreaties, but his potential candidacy became the subject of widespread speculation and polls showed that he was the preferred candidate of many Republican voters. By the time of the June 1916 Republican National Convention, Hughes had won two presidential primaries, and his backers had lined up the support of numerous delegates. Hughes led on the first presidential ballot of the convention and clinched the nomination on the third ballot. Hughes accepted the nomination, becoming the first and only sitting Supreme Court Justice to serve as a major party’s presidential nominee, and submitted his resignation to President Wilson. Roosevelt, meanwhile, declined to run again on a third party ticket, leaving Hughes and Wilson as the only major candidates in the race. 1916 electoral vote results. Because of the Republican Party’s dominance in presidential elections held since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Hughes was widely regarded as the favorite even though Wilson was the incumbent. His candidacy was further boosted by his own reputation for intelligence, personal integrity, and moderation. Hughes also won the public support of both Taft and Roosevelt, though Roosevelt remained uneasy with Hughes, whom he feared would be a Wilson with whiskers. However, the split in Republican ranks remained a lingering issue, and Hughes damaged his campaign by inadvertently snubbing Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California who had been Roosevelt’s running mate in the 1912 election. [39] Because of Hughes’s opposition to the Adamson Act and the Sixteenth Amendment, most former Progressive Party leaders endorsed Wilson. [40] By election day, Hughes was still generally considered to be the favorite. However, Wilson swept the Solid South and won several victories in the Midwest, where his candidacy was boosted by a strong pacifist sentiment. Wilson ultimately prevailed after winning the state of California by fewer than 4,000 votes. The next month, Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war, and the United States entered World War I. [43] Hughes supported Wilson’s military policies, including the imposition of the draft, and he served as chairman of New York City’s draft appeals board. He also investigated the aircraft industry on behalf of the Wilson administration, exposing numerous inefficiencies. [45] He sought to broker a compromise between President Wilson and Senate Republicans regarding US entrance into Wilson’s proposed League of Nations, but the Senate rejected the League and the Treaty of Versailles. With Wilson’s popularity declining, many Republican leaders believed that their party would win the 1920 presidential election. Hughes remained popular in the party, and many influential Republicans favored him as the party’s candidate in 1920. Hughes was struck by personal disaster when his daughter, Helen, died in 1920 of tuberculosis, and he refused to allow his name to be considered for the presidential nomination at the 1920 Republican National Convention. The party instead nominated a ticket consisting of Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio and Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts. [47] The Republican ticket won in a landslide, taking 61 percent of the popular vote. Further information: Presidency of Warren G. Harding and Presidency of Calvin Coolidge. Hughes’s residence in 1921. Shortly after Harding’s victory in the 1920 election, Hughes accepted the position of Secretary of State. [48] After the death of Chief Justice White in May 1921, Hughes was mentioned as a potential successor. Hughes told Harding he was uninterested in leaving the State Department, and Harding instead appointed former President Taft as the Chief Justice. Harding granted Hughes a great deal of discretion in his leadership of the State Department and US foreign policy. [50] Harding and Hughes frequently communicated, Hughes worked within some broad outlines, and the president remained well-informed. But the president rarely overrode any of Hughes’s decisions, with the big and obvious exception of the League of Nations. After taking office, Pres. Harding hardened his stance on the League of Nations, deciding the US would not join even a scaled-down version. [52] Or, another view is that Harding favored joining with reservations when he assumed office on March 4, 1921, but that Senators staunchly opposed (the “Irreconcilables”), per Ron Powaski’s 1991 book, threatened to wreck the new administration. Hughes favored membership in the League. Early in his tenure as Secretary of State, he asked the Senate to vote on the Treaty of Versailles, [54] but he yielded to either Harding’s changing views and/or political reality within the Senate. Instead, he convinced Harding of the necessity of a separate treaty with Germany, resulting in the signing and eventual ratification of the U. [55] Hughes also favored US entrance into the Permanent Court of International Justice, but was unable to convince the Senate to provide support. Hughes’s major initiative in office was naval disarmament, as he sought to prevent a naval arms race among the three great naval powers of Britain, Japan, and the United States. After Senator William Borah led passage of a resolution calling on the Harding administration to negotiate an arms reduction treaty with Japan and Britain, Hughes convinced those countries as well as Italy and France to attend a naval conference in Washington. Hughes selected an American delegation consisting of himself, former Secretary of State Elihu Root, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Democratic Senator Oscar Underwood. Hughes hoped that the selection of Underwood would ensure bipartisan support for any treaty arising from the conference. Prior to the conference, Hughes had carefully considered possible treaty terms since each side would seek terms that would provide their respective navy with subtle advantages. Knowing that US and foreign naval leaders would resist his proposal, he anxiously guarded it from the press, but he won the support of Root, Lodge, and Underwood. The Washington Naval Conference opened in November 1921, attended by five national delegations, and, in the gallery, hundreds of reporters and dignitaries such as Chief Justice Taft and William Jennings Bryan. On the first day of the conference, Hughes unveiled his proposal to limit naval armaments. [58] The British delegation, led by Arthur Balfour, supported the proposal, but the Japanese delegation, under the leadership of Kato Tomosaburo, asked for several modifications. Kato asked that the ratio be adjusted to 10:10:7 and refused to destroy the Mutsu, a dreadnought that many Japanese saw as a symbol of national pride. Kato eventually relented on the naval ratios, but Hughes acquiesced to the retention of the Mutsu, leading to protests from British leaders. Hughes clinched an agreement after convincing Balfour to agree to limit the size of the Admiral-class battlecruisers despite objections from the British navy. Hughes also won agreement on the Four-Power Treaty, which called for a peaceful resolution of territorial claims in the Pacific Ocean, as well as the Nine-Power Treaty, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of China. News of the success of the conference was warmly received around the world. Roosevelt would later write that the conference brought to the world the first important voluntary agreement for limitation and reduction of armament. See also: Banana Wars. Hughes (fourth from right) leads a delegation to Brazil with Carl Theodore Vogelgesang in 1922. In the aftermath of World War I, the German economy struggled from the strain of postwar rebuilding and war reparations owed to the Entente, while the Entente powers in turn owed large war debts to the United States. Though many economists favored cancellation of all European war debts, French leaders were unwilling to cancel the reparations, and Congress refused to consider forgiving the war debts. Hughes helped organize the creation of an international committee of economists to study the possibility of lowering Germany’s reparations, and Hughes selected Charles G. Dawes to lead that committee. The resulting Dawes Plan, which provided for annual payments by Germany, was accepted at a 1924 conference held in London. Hughes sought better relations with the countries of Latin America, and he favored removing US troops when he believed that doing so was practicable. He formulated plans for the withdrawal of US soldiers from the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua but decided that instability in Haiti required the continued presence of U. He also settled a border dispute between Panama and Costa Rica by threatening to send soldiers into Panama. Hughes was the keynote speaker at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching. Time cover, December 29, 1924. Hughes stayed on as Secretary of State in the Coolidge administration after the death of Harding in 1923, but he left office in early 1925. He also served as a special master in a case concerning Chicago’s sewage system, was elected president of the American Bar Association, and co-founded the National Conference on Christians and Jews. State party leaders asked him to run against Al Smith in New York’s 1926 gubernatorial election, and some national party leaders suggested that he run for president in 1928, but Hughes declined to seek public office. After the 1928 Republican National Convention nominated Herbert Hoover, Hughes gave Hoover his full support and campaigned for him across the United States. Hoover won the election in a landslide and asked Hughes to serve as his Secretary of State, but Hughes declined the offer to keep his commitment to serve as a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice. See also: Hughes Court, List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Hughes Court, and Herbert Hoover Supreme Court candidates. Portrait of Hughes as Chief Justice. On February 3, 1930, President Hoover nominated Hughes to succeed Chief Justice Taft, who was gravely ill. Though many had expected Hoover to elevate his close friend, Associate Justice Harlan Stone, Hughes was the top choice of Taft and Attorney General William D. [64][65] Though Hughes had compiled a progressive record during his tenure as an Associate Justice, by 1930 Taft believed that Hughes would be a consistent conservative on the court. [66] The nomination faced resistance from progressive Republicans such as senators George W. Norris and William E. Borah, who were concerned that Hughes would be overly friendly to big business after working as a corporate lawyer. [67][68] Many of those progressives, as well some Southern states’ rights advocates, were outraged by the Taft Court’s tendency to strike down state and federal legislation on the basis of the doctrine of substantive due process and feared that a Hughes Court would emulate the Taft Court. [69] Adherents of the substantive due process doctrine held that economic regulations such as restrictions on child labor and minimum wages violated freedom of contract, which, they argued, could not be abridged by federal and state laws because of the Fifth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment. After a brief but bitter confirmation battle, Hughes was confirmed by the Senate in a 52-26 vote, [71] and took his judicial oath of office on February 24, 1930. [1] Hughes’s son, Charles Jr. Was subsequently forced to resign as Solicitor General after his father took office as Chief Justice. [72] Hughes quickly emerged as a leader of the Court, earning the admiration of his fellow justices for his intelligence, energy, and strong understanding of the law. [73] Shortly after Hughes was confirmed, Hoover nominated federal judge John J. Parker to succeed deceased Associate Justice Edward Terry Sanford. The Senate rejected Parker, whose earlier rulings had alienated labor unions and the NAACP, but confirmed Hoover’s second nominee, Owen Roberts. [74] In early 1932, the other justices asked Hughes to request the resignation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose health had declined as he entered his nineties. Hughes privately asked his old friend to retire, and Holmes immediately sent a letter of resignation to President Hoover. To replace Holmes, Hoover nominated Benjamin N. Cardozo, who quickly won confirmation. The early Hughes Court was divided between the conservative “Four Horsemen” and the liberal “Three Musketeers”. [a][77] The primary difference between these two blocs was that the Four Horsemen embraced the substantive due process doctrine, but the liberals, including Louis Brandeis, advocated for judicial restraint, or deference to legislative bodies. [78] Hughes and Roberts would be the swing justices between the two blocs for much of the 1930s. In one of the first major cases of his tenure, Hughes joined with Roberts and the Three Musketeers to strike down a piece of state legislation in the 1931 landmark case of Near v. In his majority opinion, Hughes held that the First Amendment barred states from violating freedom of the press. Hughes also wrote the majority opinion in Stromberg v. California, which represented the first time the Supreme Court struck down a state law on the basis of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. [b][77] In another early case, O’Gorman & Young, Inc. During Hoover’s presidency, the country plunged into the Great Depression. [81] As the country faced an ongoing economic calamity, Franklin D. Roosevelt decisively defeated Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. [82] Responding to the Great Depression, Roosevelt passed a bevy of domestic legislation as part of his New Deal domestic program, and the response to the New Deal became one of the key issues facing the Hughes Court. In the Gold Clause Cases, a series of cases that presented some of the first major tests of New Deal laws, the Hughes Court upheld restrictions on the ownership of gold that were favored by the Roosevelt administration. [83] Roosevelt, who had expected the Supreme Court to rule adversely to his administration’s position, was elated by the outcome, writing that as a lawyer it seems to me that the Supreme Court has at last definitely put human values ahead of the’pound of flesh’ called for by a contract. [84] The Hughes Court also continued to adjudicate major cases concerning the states. In the 1934 case of Home Building & Loan Ass’n v. Blaisdell, Hughes and Roberts joined the Three Musketeers in upholding a Minnesota law that established a moratorium on mortgage payments. [83] Hughes’s majority opinion in that case stated that while an emergency does not create power, an emergency may furnish the occasion for the exercise of power. Beginning with the 1935 case of Railroad Retirement Board v. Roberts started siding with the Four Horsemen, creating a majority bloc that struck down New Deal laws. [86] The court held that Congress had, in passing an act that provided a mandatory retirement and pension system for railroad industry workers, violated due process and exceeded the regulatory powers granted to it by the Commerce Clause. [87] Hughes strongly criticized Roberts’s majority opinion in his dissent, writing that the power committed to Congress to govern interstate commerce does not require that its government should be wise, much less that it be perfect. The power implies a broad discretion. [86] Nonetheless, in May 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down three New Deal laws. Writing the majority opinion in A. United States, Hughes held that Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was doubly unconstitutional, falling afoul of both the Commerce Clause and the nondelegation doctrine. In the 1936 case of United States v. Butler, Hughes surprised many observers by joining with Roberts and the Four Horsemen in striking down the Agricultural Adjustment Act. [88] In doing so, the court dismantled the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the major New Deal agricultural program. [89] In another 1936 case, Carter v. The Supreme Court struck down the Guffey Coal Act, which regulated the bituminous coal industry. Hughes wrote a concurring opinion in Carter in which he agreed with the majority’s holding that Congress could not use its Commerce Clause powers to regulate activities and relations within the states which affect interstate commerce only indirectly. In the final case of the 1936 term, Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, Roberts joined with the Four Horsemen in striking down New York’s minimum wage law. [90] President Roosevelt had held up the New York minimum wage law as a model for other states to follow, and many Republicans as well as Democrats attacked the decision for interfering with the states. [91] In December 1936, the court handed down its near-unanimous opinion in United States v. Upholding a law that granted the president the power to place an arms embargo on Bolivia and Paraguay. Justice Sutherland’s majority opinion, which Hughes joined, explained that the Constitution had granted the president broad powers to conduct foreign policy. The Hughes Court in 1937, photographed by Erich Salomon. Roosevelt won re-election in a landslide in the 1936 presidential election, and congressional Democrats grew their majorities in both houses of Congress. [93] As the Supreme Court had already struck down both the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the president feared that the court would next strike down other key New Deal laws, including the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (also known as the Wagner Act) and the Social Security Act. [94] In early 1937, Roosevelt proposed to increase the number of Supreme Court seats through the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 (also known as the “court-packing plan”). Roosevelt argued that the bill was necessary because Supreme Court justices were unable to meet their case load. With large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Roosevelt’s bill had a strong chance of passage in early 1937. [95] However, the bill was poorly received by the public, as many saw the bill as power grab or as an attack on a sacrosanct institution. [96] Hughes worked behind the scenes to defeat the effort, rushing important New Deal legislation through the Supreme Court in an effort to quickly uphold the constitutionality of the laws. [97] He also sent a letter to Senator Burton K. Hughes’s letter had a powerful impact in discrediting Roosevelt’s argument about the practical need for more Supreme Court justices. While the debate over the court-packing plan continued, the Supreme Court upheld, in a 5-4 vote, the state of Washington’s minimum wage law in the case of West Coast Hotel Co. Joined by the Three Musketeers and Roberts, Hughes wrote the majority opinion, [99] which overturned the 1923 case of Adkins v. [100] In his majority opinion, Hughes wrote that the “Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract”, and further held that the Washington legislature was entitled to adopt measures to reduce the evils of the’sweating system,’ the exploiting of workers at wages so low as to be insufficient to meet the bare cost of living. “[101] Because Roberts had previously sided with the four conservative justices in Tipaldo, a similar case, it was widely perceived that Roberts agreed to uphold the constitutionality of minimum wage as a result of the pressure that was put on the Supreme Court by the court-packing plan (a theory referred to as “the switch in time that saved nine). [102] However, Hughes and Roberts would both later indicate that Roberts had committed to changing his judicial stance on state minimum wage law months before Roosevelt announced his court-packing plan. [103] Roberts had voted to grant certiorari to hear the Parrish case even before the 1936 presidential election, and oral arguments for the case had taken place in late 1936. [104] In an initial conference vote held on December 19, 1936, Roberts had voted to uphold the law. [105] Scholars continue to debate why Roberts essentially switched his vote with regards to state minimum wage laws, but Hughes may have played an important role in influencing Roberts to uphold the law. Weeks after the court handed down its decision in Parrish, Hughes wrote for the majority again in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.. Joined by Roberts and the Three Musketeers, Hughes upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act. The Wagner Act case marked a turning point for the Supreme Court, as the court began a pattern of upholding New Deal laws. [107] Later in 1937, the court upheld both the old age benefits and the taxation system established by the Social Security Act. Meanwhile, conservative Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his retirement, undercutting Roosevelt’s arguments for the necessity of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937. [108] By the end of the year, the court-packing plan had died in the Senate, and Roosevelt had been dealt a serious political wound that emboldened the conservative coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans. [109] However, throughout 1937, Hughes had presided over a massive shift in jurisprudence that marked the end of the Lochner era, a period during which the Supreme Court had frequently struck down state and federal economic regulations. [100] Hugo Black, Roosevelt’s nominee to succeed Van Devanter, was confirmed by the Senate in August 1937. [110] He was joined by Stanley Forman Reed, who succeeded Sutherland, the following year, leaving pro-New Deal liberals with a majority on the Supreme Court. Associate Justice William O. Douglas served alongside Hughes on the Supreme Court. After 1937, the Hughes Court continued to uphold economic regulations, with McReynolds and Butler often being the lone dissenters. [113] The liberal bloc was strengthened even further in 1940, when Butler was succeeded by another Roosevelt appointee, Frank Murphy. [114] In the case of United States v. Justice Stone’s majority opinion articulated a broad theory of deference to economic regulations. Carolene Products established that the Supreme Court would conduct a “rational basis review” of economic regulations, meaning that the Court would only strike down a regulation if legislators lacked a “rational basis” for passing the regulation. The Supreme Court showed that it would defer to state legislators in the cases of Madden V. Kentucky and Olsen v. [115] Hughes joined the majority in another case, United States v. Which upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The Hughes Court also faced several civil rights cases. Hughes wrote the majority opinion in Missouri ex rel. Canada, which required the state of Missouri to either integrate its law school or establish a separate law school for African-Americans. [117] He joined and helped arrange unanimous support for Black’s majority opinion in Chambers v. Florida, which overturned the conviction of a defendant who had been coerced into confessing a crime. [118] In the 1940 case of Minersville School District v. Gobitis, Hughes joined the majority decision, which held that public schools could require students to salute the American flag despite the students’ religious objections to these practices. Hughes began to consider retiring in 1940, partly due to the declining health of his wife. In June 1941, he informed Roosevelt of his impending retirement. [120] Hughes suggested that Roosevelt elevate Stone to the position of Chief Justice, a suggestion that Roosevelt accepted. [121] Hughes retired in 1941, and Stone was confirmed as the new Chief Justice, beginning the Stone Court. During his retirement, Hughes generally refrained from re-entering public life or giving advice on public policy, but he agreed to review the United Nations Charter for Secretary of State Cordell Hull, [122]and recommending that President Harry S. Truman appoint Fred M. Vinson as Chief Justice after the death of Stone. He lived in New York City with his wife, Antoinette, until she died in December 1945. [123] On August 27, 1948, at the age of 86, Hughes died in what is now the Tiffany Cottage of the Wianno Club in Osterville, Massachusetts. When he died, Hughes was the last living Justice to have served on the White Court. He is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City. In the evaluation of historian Dexter Perkins, in domestic politics. Hughes was a happy mixture of the liberal and the conservative. He was wise enough to know that you cannot preserve a social order unless you eradicate its abuses, and so he was never a stand-patter. On the other side he could see that change carried perils as well as promises. Sometimes he stood out against these perils. He was not always wise, it is true. We do not have to agree with him in everything. But he stands a noble and constructive figure in American life. In the consensus view of scholars, Hughes as a diplomat was. An outstanding Secretary of State. He possessed a clear vision of America’s position in the new international system. The United States would be a world leader, not only in terms of its ability to provide material progress, but also by its advocacy of diplomacy and arbitration over military force. Hughes was fully committed to the supremacy of negotiation and the maintenance of American foreign policy. This quality was combined with an ability to maintain a clear sense of the larger goals of American diplomacy…. He was able to maintain control over US foreign policy and take the country into a new role as a world power. Hughes has been honored in a variety of ways, including in the names of several schools, rooms, and events. Other things named for Hughes include the Hughes Range in Antarctica. On April 11, 1962, the 100th anniversary of Hughes’s birth, the U. Post Office issued a commemorative stamp in his honor. [127] The Charles Evans Hughes House, now the Burmese ambassador’s residence, in Washington, D. Was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1972. Judge Learned Hand once observed that Hughes was the greatest lawyer he had ever known, except that his son Charles Evans Hughes Jr. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Autographs\Historical”. The seller is “memorabilia111″ and is located in this country: US. This item can be shipped to United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Estonia, Australia, Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Slovenia, Japan, China, Sweden, Korea, South, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Africa, Thailand, Belgium, France, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Bahamas, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Croatia, Republic of, Malaysia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts-Nevis, Saint Lucia, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands, Barbados, Bangladesh, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bolivia, Ecuador, Egypt, French Guiana, Guernsey, Gibraltar, Guadeloupe, Iceland, Jersey, Jordan, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, Sri Lanka, Luxembourg, Monaco, Macau, Martinique, Maldives, Nicaragua, Oman, Peru, Pakistan, Paraguay, Reunion, Vietnam, Uruguay.
Supreme Court Autograph 1931 Charles E. Hughes + Envelope + Matted Signed

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-Signed US Supreme Court Card

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-Signed US Supreme Court Card

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-Signed US Supreme Court Card
Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. 20543 From the Chambers of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Card signed boldly in blue felt tip ink by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The card also has the embossed seal of the Supreme Court on the upper left portion of the card. Comes with a full Letter of Authenticity from Todd Mueller Authentics. The item “Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-Signed US Supreme Court Card” is in sale since Friday, September 25, 2020. This item is in the category “Collectibles\Autographs\Historical”. The seller is “toddmuellerautographs” and is located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This item can be shipped worldwide.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-Signed US Supreme Court Card