Wiley Rutledge
Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr. (July 20, 1894 – September 10, 1949) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1943 to 1949. The ninth and final justice appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is best known for his impassioned defenses of civil liberties. Rutledge favored broad interpretations of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause, and he argued that the Bill of Rights applied in its totality to the states. He participated in several noteworthy cases involving the intersection of individual freedoms and the government's wartime powers. Rutledge served on the Court until his death at the age of fifty-five. Legal scholars have generally thought highly of the justice, although the brevity of his tenure has minimized his impact on history.
Wiley Rutledge
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Seat established by 52 Stat. 584
September 10, 1949 (aged 55)
York, Maine, U.S.
Born in Cloverport, Kentucky, Rutledge attended several colleges and universities, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1922. He briefly practiced law in Boulder, Colorado, before accepting a position on the faculty of the University of Colorado Law School. Rutledge also taught law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Missouri, of which he became the dean; he later served as dean of the University of Iowa College of Law. As an academic, he vocally opposed Supreme Court decisions striking down parts of the New Deal and argued in favor of President Roosevelt's unsuccessful attempt to expand the Court. Rutledge's support of Roosevelt's policies brought him to the President's attention: he was considered as a potential Supreme Court nominee and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where he developed a record as a supporter of individual liberties and the New Deal. When Justice James F. Byrnes resigned from the Supreme Court, Roosevelt nominated Rutledge to take his place. The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Rutledge by voice vote, and he took the oath of office on February 15, 1943.
Rutledge's jurisprudence placed a strong emphasis on the protection of civil liberties. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), he authored an influential dissenting opinion in support of the separation of church and state. He sided with Jehovah's Witnesses seeking to invoke the First Amendment in cases such as West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) and Murdock v. Pennsylvania (1943); his majority opinion in Thomas v. Collins (1945) endorsed a broad interpretation of the Free Speech Clause. In a famed dissent in the wartime case of In re Yamashita (1946), Rutledge voted to void the war crimes conviction of the Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, condemning in ringing terms a trial that, in his view, violated the basic principles of justice and fairness enshrined in the Constitution. By contrast, he joined the majority in two cases—Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944)—that upheld the Roosevelt administration's decision to intern tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. In other cases, Rutledge fervently supported broad due process rights in criminal cases, and he opposed discrimination against women, racial minorities, and the poor.
Rutledge was among the most liberal justices ever to serve on the Supreme Court. He favored a flexible and pragmatic approach to the law that prioritized the rights of individuals. On the Court, his views aligned most often with those of Justice Frank Murphy. Rutledge died in 1949, having suffered a massive stroke, after six years' service on the Supreme Court. President Harry S. Truman appointed the considerably more conservative Sherman Minton to replace him. Although Rutledge frequently found himself in dissent during his lifetime, many of his views received greater acceptance during the era of the Warren Court.
Early life and education[edit]
Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr. was born just outside of Cloverport, Kentucky, on July 20, 1894, to Mary Lou (née Wigginton) and Wiley Blount Rutledge.[1]: 13 Wiley Sr., a native of western Tennessee, was a fundamentalist Baptist clergyman who believed firmly in the literal inerrancy of the Bible.[2]: 1313 He attended seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and then moved with his wife to pastor a church in Cloverport.[2]: 1313 After Wiley Jr.'s birth, his mother contracted tuberculosis; the family left Kentucky in search of a healthier climate.[1]: 13–14 They moved first to Texas and Louisiana and then to Asheville, North Carolina, where the elder Rutledge took up a pastorate.[2]: 1313 After his wife's death in 1903, Wiley Sr. relocated his family throughout Tennessee and Kentucky, where he held temporary pastorates before eventually accepting a permanent post in Maryville, Tennessee.[2]: 1314
In 1910, the sixteen-year-old Wiley Jr. enrolled at Maryville College.[2]: 1314 He studied Latin and Greek, successfully maintaining high grades throughout.[1]: 20 One of his Greek instructors was Annabel Person, whom he later married.[3]: 132 At Maryville, Rutledge participated vigorously in debate; he argued in support of Woodrow Wilson and against the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt.[1]: 20–21, 24 He also played football, developed a reputation as a practical jokester, and began a romantic relationship with Person, who was five years his senior.[1]: 20, 25 [2]: 1314 For reasons that are not altogether clear, Rutledge—who had planned to study law upon his graduation and whose lowest grades were in the sciences—left Maryville, enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and decided to study chemistry.[1]: 27 Lonely and struggling in his classwork, Rutledge had a difficult time in Wisconsin, and he later characterized it as being one of the "hardest" and most "painful" periods of his life.[1]: 30–31 He graduated in 1914 with an A. B. degree.[4]: 515
Realizing that his talents did not lie in chemistry, Rutledge resumed his original plan to study law.[1]: 31 Since he was unable to afford the University of Wisconsin Law School, he moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he taught high school and enrolled part-time at the Indiana University Law School.[5]: 938 The difficulty of simultaneously working and studying put a serious strain on his health, and, by 1915, he had developed a life-threatening case of tuberculosis.[2]: 1314 The ailing Rutledge removed himself to a sanatorium and gradually began to recover from his disease; while there, he married Person.[6]: 331 Upon recovering, he moved with his wife to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he took a position teaching high school business classes.[2]: 1314 In 1920, Rutledge enrolled at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder; he continued teaching high school as he again pursued the study of law.[6]: 331 [7]: 103 One of his professors was Herbert S. Hadley, the former governor of Missouri.[1]: 46 Rutledge later stated that he "owe[d] more professionally to Governor Hadley than to any other person"; Hadley's support for Roscoe Pound's progressive theory of sociological jurisprudence influenced Rutledge's view of the law.[1]: 47 Rutledge graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1922.[5]: 938
Career[edit]
Rutledge passed the bar examination in June 1922 and took a job with the law firm of Goss, Kimbrough, and Hutchison in Boulder.[1]: 47–48 In 1924, he accepted the position of associate professor of law at his alma mater, the University of Colorado.[8]: 444 He taught a wide variety of classes, and his colleagues commented that he was experiencing "very considerable success".[1]: 51–52 In 1926, Hadley—who had recently become chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis—offered Rutledge a full professorship at his university's law school; Rutledge accepted the offer and moved to St. Louis with his family that year.[1]: 51–52, 57–59 He spent nine years there, continuing to teach classes pertaining to many aspects of the law.[1]: 59 From 1930 to 1935, Rutledge served as dean of the law school; he then spent four years as dean of the University of Iowa College of Law.[9]: 111
During his time in academia, Rutledge did not function primarily as a scholar: for instance, he only published two articles in law reviews.[9]: 111 Yet his students and colleagues thought highly of him as a teacher, and the legal scholar William Wiecek noted that he was recalled as "dedicated and demanding" by those whom he taught.[9]: 111 [10]: 375 Rutledge frequently weighed in on questions of public importance, supporting academic freedom and free speech at Washington University and opposing the Supreme Court's approach to child labor laws.[2]: 1315 His tenure as dean overlapped with the New Deal-period clash between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Supreme Court whose decisions thwarted his agenda.[6]: 331 Rutledge came down firmly on Roosevelt's side: he denounced the Court's rulings striking down portions of the New Deal and voiced support for the President's unsuccessful "court-packing plan", which attempted to make the Court more amenable to Roosevelt's agenda by increasing the number of justices.[6]: 331 [10]: 375 In Rutledge's view, the justices of his era had "imposed their own political philosophy" rather than the law in their decisions; as such, he felt that expanding the Court was a regrettable but necessary way for Congress to bring it back into line.[1]: 125–127 Roosevelt's proposal was extremely unpopular in the Midwest, and Rutledge's support for it was loudly denounced: his position even led some members of the Iowa legislature to threaten to freeze faculty salaries.[2]: 1316 Still, Roosevelt noticed Rutledge's outspoken support for him, and it garnered the dean prominence on the national stage.[6]: 331 In the words of Rutledge himself, "[t]he Court bill gave me my chance".[2]: 1316
Legacy[edit]
Legal scholars have generally looked favorably upon Rutledge's tenure on the Supreme Court,[26]: 132 although the brevity of his service has lessened his historical importance.[6]: 330 In a 1965 biography, Fowler V. Harper opined that "[h]istory is writing Wiley Rutledge into the slender volume of 'Justices in the Great Tradition'".[37]: xix The political scientist A. E. Keir Nash responded in 1994 that "calling him a great justice looks somewhat like calling John Kennedy a great president. It substitutes a wistful 'what might have been' for a realistic 'what was'."[40]: 391–392 A 1970 survey of judges and legal academics ranked Rutledge as the twenty-fourth-greatest justice of the Supreme Court; a similar 1993 assessment found that he had fallen to thirty-fifth place.[44]: 427 Observing that "short tenure naturally tends to depress rankings", the scholar William G. Ross suggested that "bright and able persons" such as Rutledge "would have received higher rankings—perhaps even as 'greats'—if their tenures had not been cut short".[44]: 413 Timothy L. Hall argued in 2001 that Rutledge's judicial career "was like the unfinished first symphony of a composer who might have gone on to create great masterpieces but who died before they could ever flow from his pen ... [H]is steady outpouring of opinions over the course of six years yielded only a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been."[6]: 330, 332–333