Robert Houghwout Jackson (13 February 1892 - 9 October 1954) was an American lawyer, jurist and politician who served as an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court from 1941 until his death in 1954. He was the only person in American history to serve as U.S. Solicitor General and U.S. Attorney General as well as serving on the Supreme Court, and was the Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals following the Second World War.
Biography[]
Jackson was born in Pennsylvania in 1892. He began studying law in Jamestown, New York, at age 18, and was soon introduced to Franklin D. Roosevelt, then serving on the U.S. Senate. He was admitted to the bar in 1913 and over the next 15 years built a successful private practice. Jackson was active in Democratic Party politics, and served on a commission reviewing the New York State judicial system from 1933 - 1939 after being appointed by Roosevelt, now Governor of New York.
Jackson was involved in Roosevelt's successful 1932 Presidential campaign, and in 1934 agreed to join Roosevelt's administration as Assistant General Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service. He was later appointed to Assistant Attorney General heading the antitrust division, and was involved in a number of high-profile antitrust prosecutions. In 1938 he was appointed U.S. Solicitor General and served as the government's main advocate before the Supreme Court. He argued 44 cases before the court on behalf of the federal government, and lost only six. Roosevelt regarded Jackson as a potential successor and worked on raising his public profile, but this plan was abandoned in favour of Roosevelt running for a third term in 1940. After winning the 1940 election, Roosevelt appointed Jackson Attorney General. In this position Jackson supported an unsuccessful bill expanding the powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and worked with Roosevelt on developing the Lend-Lease agreement which allowed the U.S. to provide support to the Allied Powers during the Second World War before their official entry into the war.
In 1941 Roosevelt appointed Jackson to the Supreme Court, where he was known for his eloquent writing style and championing of individual liberties, due process and protection from government overreach. One of Jackson's main cases was West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), in which he wrote the majority opinion banning public schoolboards from expelling or prosecuting students who refused to salute the flag. He authored a dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States (1944) opposing the majority's ruling permitting the military to discriminate against Japanese-Americans. He voted with the majority in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), which blocked President Harry S. Truman's illegal seizure of steel mills during the Korean War, and authored a concurring opinion in which he proposed a three-tier test for evaluating limits on Presidential power which remains one of the most widely-cited opinions in U.S. judicial history. He also voted with the majority in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to ban racial segregation in the education system.
During his Supreme Court career, Jackson took a leave of absence in 1945 when President Truman appointed him as United States Chief Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg against 22 high-ranking Nazi German war criminals. Jackson helped draft the London Charter which established the legal framework on which the trials were based. He was noted for his zeal in his role as prosecutor, and his opening and closing arguments were widely celebrated; however, his actual case was criticized for being more focused on describing war crimes than on actually linking the defendants to them. His cross-examination skills were also widely regarded as weak, with the court rebuking Jackson during his cross-examination of Hermann Göring for allowing himself to be baited into losing his temper. Most felt it was British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe who had been more skilled at cross-examination. Nonetheless, the tribunal ended in 19 out of 22 defendants being found guilty, of whom 12 received the death penalty.
Jackson died from a heart attack in 1954.