OUR SENIOR JUSTICE
Dilliard, Irving
Our Senior Justice HUGO L. BLACK: A STUDY IN THE JUDICIAL PROCESS, by Charlotte Williams. The Johns Hopkins Press. 208 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Irving Dilliard MR. JUSTICE BLACK has just turned 65,...
...That he has positive ideas of Tightness which he believes should be embodied into law and judicial opinions is clear enough...
...After the appointment of Harlan F. Stone and Owen J. Roberts and the return of Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice, decisions which for years went against Holmes began to go in his favor...
...In recent months there have been times when he was the only member of the Court to raise his voice in protest...
...For it was Prof...
...She places him with such legal philosophers as Benjamin N. Cardozo and Samuel Wil-liston as believing that when a rule is "inconsistent with the sense of justice or with the social welfare" it should be frankly destroyed rather than allowed to wash away through continued erosion...
...When he stepped down from the bench, the Supreme Court had just about caught up with him...
...Ill Charlotte Williams' book does not quote as much of Justice Black's own words as Prof...
...By dint of these qualities directed in behalf of the common man and grounded upon a faith in the possibility of just and efficient democratic government, he has earned a unique distinction among those who have held membership upon the Supreme Court...
...Since her accounting comes down through the 1949-50 term of the Supreme Court, she presents the period in which, with Justice Douglas recovering from his serious accident...
...Once the case was heard, the four quite often were able to win over one more Justice—Reed or Frankfurter or Jackson—and the decision was handed down on the side of the citizen who claimed that his constitutional right had been invaded...
...As the years passed, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge came along to make with him a solid sure group of four Justices for hearing civil rights cases...
...John P. Frank of Yale did in his volume, Mr...
...This study shows what it means to have an able scholar of the judiciary on a university teaching staff...
...As a consequence of the lamentable deaths of Stone, Murphy, and Rutledge and the retirement of Roberts, Hugo L. Black is a dissenter again...
...Justice Black was once more too often a lone dissenter...
...Due to the Truman choices-Chief Justice Vinson and Justices Harold H. Burton, Tom C. Clark, and Sherman Minton—the outlook of the Supreme Court has been sharply limited again...
...He was the first of the Franklin Roosevelt appointees and upon occasion there was no other Justice to agree with him in his views...
...And so Justice Black repeated the experience of Mr...
...The difference between Justice Black and others is that he writes his feelings into law "not more than others, but more candidly...
...She says that when it appears the little man has had a fair deal, Justice Black is ready to let the law take its course, and when national safety seems at stake he is willing to sacrifice personal liberties...
...Justice Black: The Man and his Opinions, published two years ago...
...Justice Black, reviewing the record of his years on the bench, now might well say sadly: "This is where I came in...
...No one ever doubted his intellectual energy...
...Summing up, the author finds that for all his sympathy for the little man, Justice Black is no sentimentalist and that his feelings seldom cloud his common sense...
...But the experience which Justice Black is undergoing now is one that Holmes was spared...
...But she goes into greater detail about his political career, including, for example, the Ku Klux Klan episode...
...In his span of three decades on the Supreme bench, Justice Holmes had a long period of dissent, frequently in company with his wise colleague, Louis D. Brandeis...
...Carl B. Swisher of Johns Hopkins who first kindled Charlotte Williams' interest in the Federal judiciary...
...Would there were many more than there are because the Supreme Court, though it can stay the hand of the President and void an act of Congress, is relatively little followed and observed as compared with the White House and Capitol Hill...
...Indeed, in that one term he dissented 12 times by himself...
...JUSTICE BLACK has just turned 65, and he is completing only his 14th year on the Supreme Court, yet in a sense he has served longer than the late great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who lived to be 94 and whose years on our highest court were an even 30—from 1902 to 1932...
...Justice Holmes...
...She thinks that probably in the court's whole history no member has shown less compunction than has Justice Black in departing from judicial precedent...
...Hugo Black wrote his first notable dissents in his inaugural term of 1937-38...
...II Any American who does not appreciate the profound bearing which this may well have—indeed, is already having—on the rights of citizens under the Constitution should read Charlotte Williams' careful study of Black's career...
...Finally the author concludes: "History has now gone far enough to allow no doubt of Justice Black's learning and ability...
Vol. 15 • April 1951 • No. 4
