Robert H. Jackson

Biography

Robert Houghwout Jackson was born in Spring Creek Township, Pennsylvania, in 1892 and grew up in Frewsburg, New York. He read law in Jamestown and spent a year at Albany Law School (1911-1912), was admitted to the bar in 1913 without a law degree, and built a leading practice in Jamestown and Buffalo while becoming active in Democratic politics and a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Jackson joined the Roosevelt administration in 1934 as assistant general counsel of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, then headed the Justice Department's tax division and, from 1937, its antitrust division. As Solicitor General from 1938 to 1940 he won most of the cases he argued before the Supreme Court, and as Attorney General from 1940 to 1941 he helped shape the Lend-Lease arrangements.

Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1941. He wrote the majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which struck down compulsory flag salutes, dissented in Korematsu v. United States (1944), and in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952) set out a three-part test of presidential power. His feud with Justice Hugo Black became public in 1946.

In 1945-1946 he took leave from the Court to serve as chief United States prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, after helping draft the London Charter that created it. He joined the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in May 1954 and died in office in October 1954.