Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1962

Publication Information

37 Notre Dame L. 489 (1961-1962)

Abstract

Robert Houghwout Jackson, in defining the American way of life, reflects a penetrating self-analysis and summarizes his basic approach to judicial review. With this outlook, Attorney General Jackson was appointed to the United States Supreme Court in 1941 to fill the place left vacant by Harlan Fiske Stone upon his ascendancy to the position of Chief Justice. His appointment came at a time of political unrest and international tension. Bar and press were skeptical, indeed cynical, of "The Roosevelt Court." The days were wrapped in talk of defense, rearmament, neutrality, lend-lease. Just as a new relationship had been begrudgingly assumed between the United States and allied nations abroad, so too there was at home and before the Court a similar rearrangement between the American and his government. It was, in the words of the newly appointed Justice, "a change in the fundamental relation of the federal government toward the governed, which has come so quickly that we have not recognized its significance."

It is the object of this article to examine some of the Supreme Court decisions of Justice Jackson, to show to what extent Jackson shaped this "change in fundamental relation," and to demonstrate how many of his decisions sought to enlarge the federal sphere of influence in the American society. Such an examination may be timely because the segregation cases and the recent decision in the Tennessee reapportionment case dramatize the persistent trend to "expand the influence of the Federal Courts as instruments of social change." The jurist from Jamestown contributed to that trend with the vigor of a frontier federalist, in language tart, majestic and convincing.

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