"A Supreme Court Clerkship
with Justice Robert H. Jackson:
Reflections on the Justice and the Court"
On October 23, 2002, three of the surviving Supreme Court Law Clerks of Justice Jackson visited the Jackson Center:
Phil C. Neal (1943-45)
Murray Gartner (1945-47)
James M. Marsh (1947-49)
There was a Roundtable discussion with the Law Clerks at the Center. The discussion was moderated by Professor John Q. Barrett, St. John’s University School of Law, New York, and Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow at the Jackson Center.
That evening, there was a dinner held in their honor at the Athenaeum Hotel at Chautauqua Institution.
Biographies
Phil C. Neal, a Chicago native, is a graduate of Harvard College (1940) and Harvard Law School (1943), where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. He was Justice Jackson’s law clerk during the October Terms 1943 and 1944. In spring 1945, Jackson permitted Neal to leave his clerkship a few months early because he had, through the intercession of Justice Felix Frankfurter, the opportunity to assist Department of State official Alger Hiss in his work as secretary general of the United Nations organizing conference. By that summer, during which Jackson himself left Washington for London and later Nuremberg, Neal’s work on the United Nations project took him to San Francisco. After he left the government and briefly practiced law there, Neal became a law professor at Stanford University. He left Stanford in 1962 for the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Law School for thirteen years and then a faculty member for eight more years until his early retirement from teaching in 1983. Neal and colleagues subsequently founded the Chicago law firm of Neal, Gerber & Eisenberg, where he practices law today.
Murray Gartner (1945-47), a New York City native, graduated from New York University (1942) and Harvard Law School (1945), where he was President of the Harvard Law Review. Gartner began clerking for Justice Jackson when Phil Neal departed midway through the October 1944 Term. Because President Truman in May 1945 appointed Jackson to create an international tribunal to try the surviving principal Nazi leaders, an assignment that kept Jackson away from the Court for the next fourteen months, Gartner spent the October Term 1945 partially as a law clerk to Justice Frankfurter. Gartner resumed full-time clerking for Jackson during the October Term 1946 when he returned from Nuremberg. Gartner subsequently practiced law in San Francisco, served as Assistant General Counsel in the Economic Cooperation Administration (the Marshall Plan) in Paris from 1951 until 1953, and then returned to New York, where he became a partner in the firm that today is Proskauer Rose LLP.
James M. Marsh (1947-49), a native of Brookville
in western Pennsylvania, graduated from high school in 1931. From 1934 until
1936, he was the Jefferson County, PA, manager of the Home Owners’ Loan
Corporation. Following military service during World War II, Marsh attended
the evening division of Temple University’s School of Law. As an editor
of the Temple Law Quarterly, Marsh wrote to Justice Jackson at Nuremberg,
expressed his disappointment that American legal publications were not devoting
enough space to the Nuremberg trial, and told Jackson that Temple would publish
the trial documents if Jackson would make them available. The Justice replied
affirmatively, with thanks, and wrote a Foreword, and Marsh, who became the
Quarterly’s Editor-in-Chief, saw the project to completion. Upon Jackson’s
return to the Court from Nuremberg, he interviewed Marsh twice and then hired
him as his law clerk for the October Term 1947. Jackson subsequently asked
Marsh to stay on for the October Term 1948. Following his clerkship, Marsh
returned to Philadelphia and eventually became managing partner of LaBrum
and Doak, where he engaged in an appellate practice. He was a member of Attorney
General Kennedy’s Committee on Federal Public Defenders, Deputy and
Chief Counsel to the State Treasurer of Pennsylvania, and Chair of the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court’s Committee on Appellate Court Rules. He retired in 1997.