Harlan Fiske Stone

Harlan Fiske Stone (born Oct. 11, 1872, Chesterfield, N.H., U.S.—died April 22, 1946, Washington, D.C.) was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1925–41) and the 12th chief justice of the United States (1941–46). Sometimes considered a liberal and occasionally espousing libertarian ideas, he believed primarily in judicial self-restraint: the efforts of government to meet changing 20th-century social and political conditions should be restricted only on the basis of unconstitutionality rather than undesirability.

Stone graduated from Amherst College in 1894 and received his law degree in 1898 from the law school of Columbia University. He then taught at Columbia from 1899 and served as the dean of its law school from 1910, while also conducting a private law practice in New York City. President Calvin Coolidge appointed him attorney general of the United States (1924), in which post he reorganized the Federal Bureau of Investigation after its reputation had been tarnished by the Teapot Dome and other scandals of President Warren G. Harding’s administration. Stone’s effectiveness prompted Coolidge to appoint him an associate justice of the Supreme Court (1925), and President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted him to chief justice in succession to Charles Evans Hughes (1941).

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In his early years on the court, Stone was bracketed with Justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes (and later with Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, who replaced Holmes in 1932) as one of the “three great dissenters” against a conservative majority that disliked legislative regulation of business. During Roosevelt’s presidency (1933–45), Stone generally affirmed the legislative reforms of the New Deal, upholding, for instance, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the enactment of a national minimum-wage law in 1938. In a leading case involving federal New Deal legislation, United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), he opposed the court majority’s invalidation of the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

Besides advocating a new tolerance for state regulation of economic activity, Stone was instrumental in asserting the court’s concern for protecting individual civil liberties from governmental coercion. He was the lone dissenter when, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940), the court upheld a state ruling that children who were Jehovah’s Witnesses must join in saluting the American flag in public schools. This decision was overruled (1943) while Stone was chief justice. In Girouard v. United States, 328 U.S. 61, 76 (1946), the court followed Stone’s dissent in a similar case, United States v. Macintosh, 283 U.S. 605 (1931), in which he had argued that religious pacifists who refused to take the statutory oath to bear arms could nonetheless be naturalized as citizens.

Stone was renowned for the judicial impartiality and objectivity that he displayed in his more than 600 opinions, many of them on important constitutional questions. He was often less successful, however, in building a consensus among his associate justices, with the result that the Supreme Court during his chief justiceship was often a bitterly divided body.