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Name:
Harlan Fiske Stone
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Dates:
Born: October 11, 1872 in Chesterfied, New Hampshire
Died: April 22, 1946 in Washington, D.C.
Columbia Law Degree: 1898
Dean of Columbia Law School: 1910 - 1923
Biography:
Harlan Fiske Stone was the only university professor ever to become Chief Justice of
the Surpeme Court, one of only two chief justices ever appointed by a president of the
opposite party (Stone was a Republican, Roosevelt was a Democrat), and one of only
five chief justices ever appointed after having served as an associate justice.
When first nominated to the Supreme Court by President Coolige, a number of senators expressed concern of Stone's connections to Wall Street bankers and businesses. In an effort to alleviate their fears, Stone offered to so something that was unheard of at the time: to appear in person before them and answer their questions about his judicial philosophy and past history. This would become standard practice for Supreme Court nominees.
Early on Stone spent a lot of time on the Court in the role of dissenter, often joined by or joining Justices Brandeis, Cardozo, and Holmes. Stone felt that the position of his Republican colleagues on the Court were far too extreme in the support of laissez faire, pro-business policies. Later, Stone often voted to support Roosevelt's New Deal legislation against constitutional challenge. Before the New Deal, state governments were restricted in how much they could regulate because of Congress' powers under the Commerce Clause.
During the New Deal, Congressional regulations were struck down on the theory that they interfered with the states' police powers. Whatever arguments could be marshalled against government regulation of businesses were used, even when the exact same justices were using contradictory arguments from one case to the next. This was part of the reason why Roosevelt developed the idea of "packing" the Court by increasing the number of justices, a "solution" quickly discarded after the most conservative justices quickly began to change their votes and/or retire. After this, Stone found that his prior dissents quickly became doctrine for many majority opinions.
Although later reviled for his majority opinion which upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps without any evidence of their having done anything wrong, Stone nevertheless did more than most justices to bring the Supreme Court into the 20th century with new and more expansive understandings of civil rights and civil liberties. For example, although he was the lone dissenter in Minersville v. Gobitis, a decision which held that the children of Jehovah's Witnesses could be forced to salue the flag, his arguments prevailed just three years later in West Virginia v. Barnette when the Court overruled Minersville 6-3, deciding that such compulsion was a violation of the children's free exercise of religion.
Stone's ideas regarding the expansion of civil liberties were an integral part of a wider judicial philosophy which saw the necessity of also increasing governmental power in the face of changing social, political, and economic conditions of the 20th century. For Stone, the old philosophies belonged to an America of the past which would never again exist; in the modern, industrialized United States, the government needed the power to govern, and that now included more expansive powers of economic regulation. This was something his conservative colleagues never accepted and which today remains anathema to many legal philosophers on the right.
Stone was also opposed to what he considered "judicial legislating," the idea of judges taking over the powers of legislators which he thought was gaining too much popularity on both the left and the right. He believed very strongly in judicial restraint and deference towards the legislative and executive branches. In his dissent in United States v. Butler (1938), for example, he accused the majority of "torturing" the Constitution in the guise of "interpreting" it. Stone argued that judges inevitably allowed their personal feelings creep into their decision; because it could not be avoided entirely, he therefore concluded that judges should exercise as much conscious and deliberate restraint as possible in order to achieve some balance.
Also Known As: none
Alternate Spellings: none
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Related Resources:
What are Political and Legal Philosophy
The Philosophy of Politics and the Philosophy of Law are often studied separately, but they are presented here jointly because they both come back to the same thing: the study of force. Politics is the study of political force in the general community, while jurisprudence is the study of how laws can and should be used to achieve political and social goals.What is Philosophy?
What is philosophy? Is there any point in studying philosophy, or is it a useless subject? What are the different branches of philosophy - what's the difference between aestheitcs and ethics? What's the difference between metaphysics and epistemology?
