Solicitor General Robert H. Jackson
Solicitor General Robert H. Jackson
On January 27, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Assistant Attorney General Jackson to be Solicitor General. The office was vacant because Stanley Reed, Solicitor General since March 1935, had been nominated and confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on January 25th. Jackson's nomination was confirmed by the Senate on March 4th and he was sworn in as Solicitor General on March 5, 1938.
The Solicitor General was, at this time, the second-ranking official in the United States Department of Justice. The Solicitor General also was, as he is today, the official charged with supervising and conducting government litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States.
As Solicitor General, Robert Jackson personally argued more than thirty Supreme Court cases. Jackson was in this period--as he had been previously in private practice and in his earlier government offices, and as he continued to be when he was Attorney General and at Nuremberg--one of the finest courtroom advocates ever. In a private description of a masterful Jackson oral argument before the Supreme Court, Justice Louis D. Brandeis once remarked that Jackson was so good that he "should be Solicitor General for life."
Solicitor General Jackson also regularly served as Acting Attorney General when the Attorney General (first Homer Cummings, then Frank Murphy) was out of Washington. As Acting AG and generally, SG Jackson continued during this period to deal directly and intimately with President Roosevelt on a wide range of governmental and political matters.
Jackson served as Solicitor General from March 5, 1938, until January 1940, when he resigned the position upon being confirmed as Attorney General of the United States.
Further information on Jackson as Solicitor General can be found in leading articles by Warner W. Gardner, an attorney who worked closely with Jackson in that office ("Robert H. Jackson: Government Attorney," 55 Columbia Law Review 438-44 (1955)), and by E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., who was Jackson's final Supreme Court law clerk ("Robert H. Jackson: 'Solicitor General for Life,'" 1992 Journal of Supreme Court History 75-85).
For general information about the Office of the Solicitor General, visit its web site at http://www.usdoj.gov/osg. Leading books include Lincoln Caplan, The Tenth Justice: The Solicitor General & the Rule of Law (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, and Vintage Books, 1988) and Rebecca Mae Salokar, The Solicitor General: The Politics of Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
by John Q.
Barrett
last edited
1/15/2003