Harlan F. Stone
Chief justice portrait
12thChief Justice of the United States
In office July 3, 1941 – April 22, 1946
Nominated by	Franklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded by	Charles Evans Hughes
Succeeded by	Fred M. Vinson
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
In office March 2, 1925 – July 3, 1941
Nominated by	Calvin Coolidge
Preceded by	Joseph McKenna
Succeeded by	Robert H. Jackson
52ndUnited States Attorney General
In office April 7, 1924 – March 1, 1925
President	Calvin Coolidge
Preceded by	Harry M. Daugherty
Succeeded by	John G. Sargent
4thDean of Columbia Law School
In office 1910–1923
Preceded by	George Washington Kirchwey
Succeeded by	Young Berryman Smith
Personal details
Born	Harlan Fiske Stone (1872-10-11)October 11, 1872 Chesterfield, New Hampshire, U.S.
Died	April 22, 1946(1946-04-22) (aged 73) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Resting place	Rock Creek Cemetery
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Agnes Harvey ​ (m. 1899)​
Children	Marshall Lauson
Education	Amherst College (BS) Columbia University (LLB)
Signature

Harlan Fiske Stone (October 11, 1872 – April 22, 1946) was an American attorney who served as anassociate justice of theU.S. Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and then as the 12thchief justice of the United States from 1941 until his death in 1946. He also served as theU.S. Attorney General from 1924 to 1925 under PresidentCalvin Coolidge, with whom he had attendedAmherst College as a young man. His most famous dictum was that "Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern."^[1]

Raised inWestern Massachusetts,^[2] Stone practiced law inNew York City after graduating fromColumbia Law School. He became theDean of Columbia Law School and a partner withSullivan & Cromwell. DuringWorld War I, he served on theU.S. Department of War's Board of Inquiry, which evaluated the sincerity ofconscientious objectors. In 1924, PresidentCalvin Coolidge appointed Stone as the Attorney General. Stone sought to reform theU.S. Department of Justice in the aftermath of several scandals that occurred during the administration of PresidentWarren G. Harding. He also pursued severalantitrust cases against large corporations.

In 1925, Coolidge nominated Stone to the Supreme Court to succeed retiring Associate JusticeJoseph McKenna, and Stone wonU.S. Senate confirmation with little opposition. On theTaft Court, Stone joined with JusticesOliver Wendell Holmes Jr. andLouis Brandeis in calling forjudicial restraint and deference to the legislative will. On theHughes Court, Stone and Justices Brandeis andBenjamin N. Cardozo formed a liberal bloc called theThree Musketeers that generally voted to uphold the constitutionality of theNew Deal. His majority opinions inUnited States v. Darby Lumber Co. (1941) andUnited States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938) were influential in shaping standards of judicial scrutiny.

In 1941, PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt nominated Stone to succeed the retiringCharles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice, and the Senate quickly confirmed Stone. TheStone Court presided over several cases duringWorld War II, and Stone's majority opinion inEx parte Quirin upheld the jurisdiction of aU.S. military tribunal over the trial of eight Germansaboteurs. His majority opinion inInternational Shoe Co. v. Washington (1945) was influential with regards topersonal jurisdiction. Stone was the chief justice inKorematsu v. United States (1944), ruling the exclusion of Japanese Americans intointernment camps as constitutional. Stone served as Chief Justice until his death in 1946. He had one of theshortest terms of any chief justice, and was the first chief justice not to have served in elected office.

Stone was born inChesterfield, New Hampshire, on October 11, 1872, to Fred Lauson Stone and Ann Sophia (née Butler) Stone.^[3] When Stone was two years old, his family moved toWestern Massachusetts where he grew up.^[4][2] He graduated fromAmherst High School. His father wished him to become a scientific farmer, and Stone matriculated at theMassachusetts Agricultural College where he attended classes^[5] from 1888 to 1890^[5] and was later expelled at the end of his second year for a scuffle with an instructor.^[2] He later enrolled atAmherst College where he graduated in 1894Phi Beta Kappa.^[6]

From 1894 to 1895, he was the sub master ofNewburyport High School inMassachusetts, from which he also taughtphysics andchemistry. From 1895 to 1896, he was an instructor in history atAdelphi Academy inBrooklyn.^[7]

Stone attendedColumbia Law School from 1895 to 1898, received anLL.B., and was admitted to the New York bar in 1898.^[8] Stone practiced law inNew York City, initially as a member of the firm Satterlee, Canfield & Stone, and later as a partner in what is now awhite-shoe law firm,Sullivan & Cromwell. From 1899 to 1902 he lectured on law at Columbia Law School. He was a professor there from 1902 to 1905 and eventually served as the school's dean from 1910 to 1923.^[8] He lived inthe Colosseum, an apartment building near campus.

DuringWorld War I, Stone served for several months on aWar Department Board of Inquiry, with Major Walter Kellogg of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Corps and JudgeJulian Mack, that reviewed the cases of 2,294 men whose requests for conscientious objector status had been denied by their draft boards. The Board was charged with determining the sincerity of each man's principles, but often devoted only a few minutes to interrogation and rendering a decision. Stone was impatient with men who took advantage of the benefits of life in America – using postage stamps was his example – without accepting the burdens of citizenship. In a majority of cases, the Board's subjects either relinquished their claims or were judged insincere. He later summarized his experience with little sympathy: "The great mass of our citizens subordinated their individual conscience and their opinions to the good of the common cause" while "there was a residue whose peculiar beliefs ... refused to yield to the opinions of others or to force."^[9] Nevertheless, he recognized the courage required to persist as a conscientious objector: "The Army was not a bed of roses for the conscientious objector; and the normal man who was not supported in his stand by profound moral conviction might well have chosen active duty at the front as the easier lot."^[10]

At the end of the war, he criticized Attorney GeneralA. Mitchell Palmer for his attempts todeport aliens based on administrative action without allowing for any judicial review of their cases.^[11] During this time Stone also defended free speech claims for professors and socialists.^[12] Columbia soon became a center of a new school of jurisprudence,legal realism.^[12] Legal realists rejected formalism and static legal rules; instead, they searched for the experiential and the role of human idiosyncrasy in the development of law.^[12] Although Dean Stone encouraged the realists, he was condemned by Columbia PresidentNicholas Murray Butler as an intellectual conservative who had let legal education at Columbia fall "into the ruts."^[13]

In 1923, disgusted by his conflict with Butler and bored with "all the petty details of law school administration" that he dubbed "administrivia", Stone resigned the deanship and joined the prestigiousWall Street firm ofSullivan & Cromwell.^[14] He received a much higher salary and headed the firm's litigation department, which had a large corporation and estate practice (includingJ.P. Morgan Jr.'s interests).^[12] In full‑time private practice for only a brief time, Stone was considered a "hard‑working, solid sort of person, willing on occasion to champion the rights of mankind, but safe nevertheless."^[15]

On April 1, 1924, he was appointedUnited States Attorney General by his Amherst classmatePresidentCalvin Coolidge, who felt Stone would be perceived by the public as beyond reproach to oversee investigations into various scandals arising under theHarding administration.^[12] These scandals had besmirchedHarding's Attorney General,Harry M. Daugherty, and forced his resignation.^[12] In one of his first acts as Attorney General, Stone fired Daugherty's cronies in the Department of Justice and replaced them with men of integrity.^[12] As Attorney General, he was responsible for the appointment ofJ. Edgar Hoover as head of theDepartment of Justice's Bureau of Investigation,^[16] which later became theFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and directed him to remodel the agency so it would resemble Britain'sScotland Yard and become far more efficient than any other police organization in the country. A pro‑active Attorney General, Stone argued many of his department's cases in the federal courts and launched an anti‑trust investigation of theAluminum Company of America, controlled by the family of fellow cabinet memberAndrew Mellon, Coolidge's Secretary of the Treasury.^[12]

In the 1924 presidential election, Stone campaigned for Coolidge's re‑election.^[12] He especially opposed the left-wing Progressive Party's candidate,Robert M. La Follette, who had proposed that Congress be empowered to reenact any legislation that had been struck down by the Supreme Court.^[12] Stone found this idea threatening to the integrity of the judiciary as well as the separation of powers.^[12]

Shortly after the election, JusticeJoseph McKenna retired from the Supreme Court, and on January 5, 1925, Coolidge nominated Stone to replace McKenna as an associate justice.^[12][17] His nomination was greeted with general approval, although there were rumors that Stone might have been kicked upstairs because of his antitrust activities.^[12] Some Senators raised questions about Stone's connection to Wall Street making him a tool of corporate interests.^[12] To quiet those fears, Stone proposed that he answer questions of theSenate Judiciary Committee in person.^[12] After holding one closed door hearing on January 12, 1925, where they heard testimony fromWillard Saulsbury Jr., the committee gave Stone's nomination a favorable recommendation on January 21, 1925. The nomination was returned by the Senate to committee a few days later, and Stone became the first Supreme Court nominee to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on their nomination on January 28, 1925. On February 2, 1925, the committee again gave his nomination a favorable recommendation.^[18] Stone was confirmed by the Senate on February 5, 1925, by a vote of 71–6,^[12] and received his commission the same day.^[8] On March 2, 1925, Stone, who would ultimately be Coolidge's only Supreme Court appointment, took the oath as an associate justice administered by Chief JusticeWilliam Howard Taft.^[12]

The Supreme Court of the mid‑1920s was primarily concerned with the relationships of business and government.^[12] A majority of the justices led by Taft were staunch defenders of business and capitalism free from most government regulation.^[12] The Court utilized the doctrines ofsubstantive due process and the fundamental right of "liberty of contract" to oversee attempts at regulation by the national and state governments. Critics of the Court charged that the judiciary had usurped legislative authority and had embodied a particular economic theory,laissez faire, into its decisions.^[12] Despite the fears of progressives,^[12] Stone quickly joined the Court's "liberal faction",^[12] frequently dissenting with JusticesHolmes andBrandeis and later, Cardozo when he took Holmes' seat, from the majority's narrow view of the police powers of the state.^[12] The "liberal" justices called forjudicial restraint,^[12] or deference to the legislative will.^[12]

During the 1932 to 1937 Supreme Court terms, Stone and his colleagues Justices Brandeis and Cardozo were considered theThree Musketeers of the Supreme Court, its liberal orDemocratic-aligned faction. The three were highly supportive of PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt'sNew Deal agenda, which many other Supreme Court Justices opposed. For example, he wrote for the court inUnited States v. Darby Lumber Co.,^[19]312 U.S.100 (1941), which upheld challenged provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Stone also authored the Court's opinion inUnited States v. Carolene Products Co.,^[20]304 U.S.144 (1938), which, in its famous "Footnote 4", may have provided a roadmap fortiered scrutiny in the post-Lochner v. New York era.

Stone's support of the New Deal brought him Roosevelt's favor, and on June 12, 1941, President Roosevelt nominated Stone to become chief justice,^[17][18] a position vacated byCharles Evans Hughes. Stone was Hughes’ personal choice for a successor.^[21] After it held a single hearing on Stone's nomination on June 21, 1941, the Senate Judiciary Committee gave his nomination a favorable recommendation on June 23, 1941.^[18] Stone was confirmed by avoice vote in the Senate on June 27, 1941, and received his commission on July 3, 1941.^[18][21] He remained in this position for the rest of his life.^[8]

As chief justice, Stone spoke for the Court in upholding the President's power to tryNazi saboteurs captured onAmerican soil bymilitary tribunals inEx parte Quirin,^[22]317 U.S.1 (1942). The Court's handling of this case has been the subject of scrutiny and controversy.^[23]

Stone also wrote one of the major opinions in establishing the standard forstate courts to have personal jurisdiction over litigants inInternational Shoe Co. v. Washington,^[24]326 U.S.310 (1945).

As chief justice, Stone described theNuremberg court as "a fraud" on Germans, even though his colleague and successor as associate justice,Robert H. Jackson, served as the chief U.S. prosecutor.^[25]

Stone was the fourth chief justice to have previously served as an Associate Justice and the second to have served in both positions consecutively. To date, Justice Stone is the only justice to have occupied all nine seniority positions on the bench, having moved from most junior associate justice to most senior associate justice and then to chief justice.

Stone was suddenly stricken while in an open session of the Supreme Court. He had just (or by some accounts not quite) finished reading aloud his dissent inGirouard v. United States.^[26] JusticeHugo Black called the Court into a brief recess, and physicians were called.

Stone died of acerebral hemorrhage on April 22, 1946, at his Washington D.C. home.^[27]

Stone is buried atRock Creek Cemetery in thePetworth neighborhood ofWashington, D.C.^[28][29] His grave is near those of other justices, including JusticeWillis Van Devanter, JusticeJohn Marshall Harlan, and JusticeStephen Johnson Field.^[28][30]

Stone was a director of theAtlanta & Charlotte Air Line Railroad Company, president of theAssociation of American Law Schools, a member of theAmerican Bar Association, and a member of theLiterary Society of Washington for 11 years.^[31]

Stone was awarded an honoraryMaster of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1900, and an honoraryDoctor of Laws degree from Amherst in 1913.Yale awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1924. Columbia andWilliams each awarded him the same honorary degree in 1925. Amherst would later name Stone Hall in his honor, upon its completion in 1964.

Stone was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1933 and theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1939.^[32][33]

Columbia Law School awards Harlan Fiske Stone Scholarships to students who demonstrate superior academic performance.^[34]Yale Law School awards the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize each fall to winners of the Morris Tyler Moot Court competition.^[35]

His brother wasWinthrop Stone, president ofPurdue University.

Stone married Agnes E. Harvey in 1899. Their children wereLauson H. Stone and the mathematicianMarshall H. Stone.

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Notes

Bibliography

• Abraham, Henry J. (1992).Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court (3rd ed.). NY:Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-506557-3.
• Attorney General biographies, Harlan Fiske Stone,United States Department of Justice.
• Cushman, Clare (2001).The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated Biographies, 1789–1995 (2nd ed.). (Supreme Court Historical Society,Congressional Quarterly Books).ISBN 1-56802-126-7.
• Frank, John P. (1995). Friedman, Leon; Israel, Fred L. (eds.).The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions.Chelsea House Publishers.ISBN 0-7910-1377-4.
• Galston, Miriam. 1995. "Activism and Restraint: The Evolution of Harlan Fiske Stone's Judicial Philosophy," inTulane Law Review 70 (November).
• Hall, Kermit L., ed. (1992).The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. NY: Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-505835-6.
• Konefsky, Samuel Joseph. 1945.Chief Justice Stone and the Supreme Court (Reprint, 1971. NY: Hafner)
• Mason, Alpheus Thomas,Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law New York,Viking Press, 1956.ISBN 0-670-36997-7;ISBN 978-0-670-36997-3Review of Mason, Alpheus Thomas, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law.
• Oyez project,Official Supreme Court media, Harlan Fiske Stone
• Rehnquist, William H. (1998).All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime. NY:William Morrow & Co.ISBN 0-688-05142-1.
• Stone, Harlan Fiske. 2001.Law and Its Administration Union, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange.Available free atarchive.org.
• Urofsky, Melvin I.,Division and Discord: The Supreme Court under Stone and Vinson, 1941–1953 (University of South Carolina Press, 1997)ISBN 1-57003-120-7
• Urofsky, Melvin I. (1994).The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary. NY:Garland Publishing. pp. 590.ISBN 0-8153-1176-1.

Further reading

• Corley, Pamela C.; Steigerwalt, Amy; Ward, Artemus. (2013).The Puzzle of Unanimity: Consensus on the United States Supreme Court. Stanford University Press.ISBN 978-0-8047-8472-6.

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