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A Jackson Portrait for Jamestown

Playing it Dangerous: Justice Jackson’s Passionate Style

Robert H. Jackson: A Perspective Twenty-Five Years Later

Mr. Justice Jackson

Charles S. Desmond, Paul A. Freund, Justice Potter Stewart & Lord Shawcross, Mr. Justice Jackson: Four Lectures in His Honor (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969) (with introductions by Whitney North Seymour, John Lord O’Brian, Judge Charles D. Breitel and Justice John M. Harlan).

Brown v. Board of Education Law Clerks Roundtable

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States decided in Brown v. Board of Education that state and federal laws segregating public school children by race were unconstitutional. In Brown, which actually is the name of just one of the five lower court decisions on school segregation that the Supreme Court reviewed 50 years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a Supreme Court that was unanimous. The Court in Brown explicitly rejected its own almost 60-year-old precedent approving "separate but equal" public institutions and facilities for persons of differing races. Brown is generally regarded as among the most, if not as itself the most, significant Supreme Court decision in United States history.
On April 28, 2004, the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York, assembled, for a group discussion, four former Supreme Court law clerks: John David Fassett, Earl E. Pollock, E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr. and Frank E.A. Sander.

Brown v. Board of Education II Law Clerks Roundtable

Here is the transcript of the May 18, 2005 roundtable discussion at the Jackson Center of Supreme Court law clerks Gordon B. Davidson, Daniel J. Meador, Earl E. Pollock, and E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., who served on the Court at the time of the Brown II decision in 1955, moderated and introduced by John Q. Barrett. Although Robert H. Jackson died before the Brown II decision, his last law clerk, E. Barrett Prettyman continued to clerk for John Marshall Harlan, who succeeded Jackson on the Court. With the phrase "with all deliberate speed," Brown II dictated how the unanimous anti-segregation Brown I decision from the year before was to be implemented. Brown I was the last case that Robert H. Jackson was involved in before his death on October 9, 1954.

Robert H. Jackson’s Oral Arguments Before the New York Court of Appeals

John Q. Barrett's article "Robert H. Jackson's Oral Arguments Before the New York Court of Appeals," appears in the Spring/Summer 2005 newsletter of the Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York on pages 3 to 5.

An Unappreciated Heritage

[I]f a high school course has not taught us to place a higher than commercial estimate upon the works of nature, the vital quality of our education is wanting. [I]t is for us to rescue nature’s endowment from the hand of the despoiler and deliver her beauty from the blight of avarice. ...To us in this garden spot of new America is given a little city, also built upon hills and set gem-like within the seven encircling ends of a silver stream. Let it be one of the responsible and abiding tasks of our lives to make this loved home of our youth year by year more worthy of the setting which has been so cunningly fashioned by Nature’s matchless handicraft.

Why Learned and Augustus Hand Became Great

"These men found their highest satisfaction in judicial work. It fulfilled their every ambition. They put all they had into it-they have not shirked even its drudgery. They wrote their opinions with no appeal for applause and sought only to merit the ultimate approval of their profession. They have not been looking over their shoulders to see whom they please. They have represented an independent and intellectually honest judiciary at its best. And the test of an independent judiciary is a simple one-the one you would apply in choosing an umpire for a baseball game. What do you ask of him? You do not ask that he shall never make a mistake or always agree with you, or always support the home team. You want an umpire who calls them as he sees them. And that is what the profession has admired in the Hands."