Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Scott Wheeler paid tribute to master of the Broadway musical Stephen Sondheim. Today, Matthew Walther remembers Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who went from pitching hay on a farm to prosecuting Nazis in Nuremberg. —The Editors
Robert H. Jackson was the last justice of the Supreme Court not to have finished law school; he didn’t even earn a bachelor’s degree. It is something of a paradox that one of the great representatives of the old frontier class of jobbing lawyers was also perhaps the most urbane and morally serious jurist this country has produced.
A moderate, temperamentally conservative New Dealer who owed his public career entirely to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jackson refused to join in the pogrom utilitarianism of Korematsu v. United States—where the Court upheld the executive order that led to the internment of around 70,000 American citizens of Japanese descent—producing one of the most bracing dissents ever sent down from the high court. He sided with the majority in Brown v. Board of Education but had serious misgivings about legislating from the bench, even in a good cause. Most significantly, at Nuremberg, where he served as the American chief of counsel, Jackson provided the philosophical basis for the International Military Tribunal, wrongly described by the late Antonin Scalia as an exercise in victor’s justice. Jackson’s verticordious arguments—beautifully phrased, necessarily grounded in an appeal to transcendental moral standards—are probably the only writings by a Supreme Court justice that would be recognizable to the great jurists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the products of a unified Christian civilization. That his own faith largely consisted of a coolly vestigial Protestantism combined with what he politely called a “sort of disdain” for low-church uplift makes this achievement all the more remarkable.
