|
||
Name:
Fred M. Vinson
Frederick Moore Vinson
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Dates:
Born: January 22, 1890 in Louisa, Kentucky
Died: September 8, 1953 in Washington, D.C.
Chief Justice: 1946 - 1953
Biography:
Fred Vinson served in elected government positions at a variety of levels - he was
elected district attorney of his home town in 1921 and, in 1924, he was elected to
Congress. He was put on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1937, but
he resigned in 1943 to serve as director of Economic Stabilization for President
Roosevelt. President Truman chose him to fill the seat of Chief Justice Harlan F.
Stone in part because of this wide-ranging experience and in part because he was an
outsider - unfortunately, the Court at this time was split by many personal and
professional disagreements.
It seems that Truman hoped Vinson would be able to calm matters and lead the Court more effectively than someone already there. Unfortunately, Vinson was not able to entirely fix things - the public rancor dissipated somewhat, and Vinson can take credit for some of that. However, the personal conflicts, especially that between Hugo Black and Robert H. Jackson, continued to interfere with Court business.
Vinson's record is often rated poorly - indeed, some have labeled him a failure. However, such characterizations are not entirely fair. The Court he presided over was already split by personal and ideological conflicts and, moreover, his tenure was relatively short in comparison to those of many other Chief Justices. Some of the criticism of Vinson can perhaps be traced to the fact that he did not develop any overarching judicial philosophy, no systematic view of the Constitution, and he did not assign many important cases to himself.
However, perhaps that was the sort of Chief Justice best suited for a Court which, in retrospect, was going through an important transition phase. Behind the Supreme Court was the "Lochner Era," a time when the Court was focused upon the protection of the interests of business and capital. Before the Supreme Court was the era when civil rights and individual liberty would come to predominate. Indeed, for some people Vinson is most famous for the fact that his death in 1953 led to the appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice and that, in turn, led to the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Had Vinson been presiding over the court and not Earl Warren, it is uncertain just what the final decision in Brown would have been - even if it had still gone the same way, it might not have been a unanimous vote and at the time it was certainly better for the country to see the Supreme Court united in opposition to school segregation. A divided Court opinion would have provided racists and segregationists with greater leverage in their efforts to keep white and black children separated and the course of American Civil Rights could have been very different.
Also Known As: none
Alternate Spellings: none
Common Misspellings: none
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.
