Stone Court (judges)


The Stone Court refers to the Supreme Court of the United States from 1941 to 1946, when Harlan F. Stone served as Chief Justice of the United States. Stone succeeded Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice after the latter's retirement, and Stone served as Chief Justice until his death, at which point Fred Vinson was nominated and confirmed as Stone's replacement. He was the fourth chief justice to have previously served as an associate justice and the second to have done so without a break in tenure. Presiding over the country during World War II, the Stone Court delivered several important war-time rulings, such as in Ex parte Quirin, where it upheld the President's power to try Nazi saboteurs captured on American soil by military tribunals. He also supported the federal government's policy of relocating Japanese Americans into internment camps.

Membership

The Stone Court began in 1941, when Associate Justice Stone was confirmed to replace Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice. Stone had served as an Associate Justice since 1925, when President Calvin Coolidge nominated him to the bench. During the Court's 1932–37 terms, Stone and justices Brandeis and Cardozo formed a liberal bloc called the Three Musketeers that generally voted to uphold the constitutionality of the New Deal.
At the beginning of Stone's chief-justiceship, the Court consisted of Stone, Owen Roberts, Hugo Black, Stanley F. Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, James F. Byrnes, and Robert H. Jackson. In October 1942, Byrnes resigned from the court to become the war-time Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization; Roosevelt appointed Wiley Blount Rutledge as his replacement. Owen Roberts retired in July 1945, and President Harry Truman appointed Harold Hitz Burton to replace him.
Shortly before V-E Day, Truman named Justice Jackson to serve as U.S. Chief of Counsel for the prosecution of high-ranking German officials accused of war crimes at the 1945–46 Nuremberg trials. As a result, Jackson was absent for one entire Court term, and his fellow justices had to do an extra amount of work during the term. Stone died on April 22, 1946 after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. Truman subsequently appointed Fred Vinson as Stone's successor.

Timeline

Rulings of the Court

Major rulings of the Stone Court include:
Stone had largely sided with the government's position when the Hughes Court struck down several pieces of New Deal legislation, and the Stone Court consistently upheld Congressional power pursuant to the Commerce Clause. The Stone Court also upheld broad war-time powers for the government. The Stone Court was less deferential in the area of civil liberties, striking down laws in cases such as Barnett, although Korematsu was a major exception to this trend. Despite Roosevelt's appointment of seven of the nine justices, the justices held independent views and often found each other at odds in regard to civil liberties. Stone himself received criticism for presiding over a divided and quarrelsome court. Justice Frankfurter often took a position supporting judicial restraint in which the court took deference to the decisions of elected officials, while Justices Black and Douglas were more willing to strike down laws and precedents for what they saw as violations of constitutional rights. Murphy and Rutledge joined Black and Douglas as part of the more liberal bloc, while Jackson, Reed, and Stone tended to side with Frankfurter. Roberts often sided with the Frankfurter bloc, but was more conservative than the other eight justices. Though outnumbered, the more liberal bloc led by Black and Douglas often took the majority in cases by peeling off the votes from the moderate bloc, and the two groupings of justices did not form as tight of blocs as had existed in the Hughes Court. The short length of the Stone Court gave it little chance to establish a definitive legacy. However, the Stone Court continued the Constitutional Revolution of 1937 that had started during the Hughes Court and foreshadowed the liberal rulings of the Warren Court.

Works centering on the Stone Court