Blackmun, Harry A. (12 November 1908–04 March 1999), Supreme Court justice, was born Harry Andrew Blackmun in Nashville, Illinois, the son of Corwin Manning Blackmun and Theo Reuter Blackmun, whose family owned a flour mill in Nashville. Blackmun grew up in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, where his father worked in a succession of enterprises, including wholesale and retail businesses, banking, and insurance. Blackmun was raised in a devoutly Methodist family with a strong work ethic. Although he was a serious, hardworking student, he had a healthy sense of humor and a well-rounded personality. He and ...
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Blackmun, Harry A. (1908-1999), Supreme Court justice
Tinsley E. Yarbrough
Article
Brandeis, Louis Dembitz (13 November 1856–05 October 1941), "people's attorney" and U.S. Supreme Court justice
Philippa Strum
Brandeis, Louis Dembitz (13 November 1856–05 October 1941), "people's attorney" and U.S. Supreme Court justice, “people’s attorney” and U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Adolph Brandeis, a successful businessman, and Frederika Dembitz. His parents, non-practicing Jews, had quietly supported the unsuccessful Austrian uprising of 1848 and had immigrated to the United States with their families in the wake of the repression and anti-Semitism that followed. Born as Louis David, Louis changed his middle name as a teenager in honor of his uncle, abolitionist lawyer ...
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Brandeis, Louis Dembitz (13 November 1856–05 October 1941)
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Louis Brandeis. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-92924).
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Butler, Pierce (1866-1939), lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice
David Ray Papke
Butler, Pierce (17 March 1866–16 November 1939), lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born in Dakota County, Minnesota, the son of Patrick Butler and Mary Gaffney, farmers. His parents were Irish immigrants who came to the United States in 1848 because of the potato famine. Butler worked during his youth on the family farm and delighted in his parents’ tales of Ireland and their supposed acquaintance with General ...
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Butler, Pierce (1866-1939)
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Pierce Butler. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-105088).
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Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan (1870-1938), lawyer and jurist
Richard Polenberg
Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan (24 May 1870–09 July 1938), lawyer and jurist, was born in New York City, the son of Albert Cardozo, a lawyer, and Rebecca Washington Nathan. Cardozo’s mother died when he was nine, his father when he was fifteen. His sister, Ellen, ten years his senior, assumed much of the responsibility for raising him. Cardozo never married but resided with Ellen; she died in 1929 and thereafter he lived alone. The Cardozos were Sephardic Jews, congregants of Shearith Israel (Remnant of Israel), often called the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue. Rabbi ...
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Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan (1870-1938)
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Benjamin N. Cardozo. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-104956).
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Catron, John (1781?–30 May 1865), lawyer and Supreme Court justice
Richard L. Aynes
Catron, John (1781?–30 May 1865), lawyer and Supreme Court justice, was born according to some accounts in Pennsylvania, and according to others in Virginia. The year of his birth is variously given between 1778 and 1787, although his niece reported that before he died Catron told his family he was born in 1781. Nothing is known of his parents. His early life was spent in Virginia. He later moved to Kentucky and then to Tennessee, where in 1807 he married Matilda Childress of Nashville. They had no children....
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Cobb, Howell (1815-1868), lawyer and politician
Brooks D. Simpson
Cobb, Howell (07 September 1815–09 October 1868), lawyer and politician, was born at Cherry Hill in Jefferson County, Georgia, the son of John Addison Cobb, a planter, and Sarah Robinson (Rootes). Enrolling in Franklin College (now the University of Georgia) in Athens, Georgia, in 1829, he graduated in 1834. His college years were marked by his expulsion from school after participating in a riot to protest disciplinary action by the faculty for a minor infraction of leaving campus without permission; he was later readmitted. At the same time, they saw him first show signs of his strong Unionism, for he opposed the nullification movement in South Carolina. On 26 May 1835 he married Mary Ann Lamar; the couple had six children. With marriage Cobb acquired his wife’s sizable estate, including several cotton plantations and some 200 slaves....
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Cobb, Howell (1815-1868)
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Howell Cobb. Daguerreotype from the studio of Mathew B. Brady. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-110081).
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Daniel, Peter Vivian (1784-1860), lawyer, state official, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
E. Lee Shepard
Daniel, Peter Vivian (24 April 1784–31 May 1860), lawyer, state official, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was born at “Crow’s Nest,” in Stafford County, Virginia, the son of Travers Daniel, a planter, and Frances Moncure. His ancestors settled in Virginia early in the seventeenth century and founded a prominent gentry family. Daniel attended the College of New Jersey at Princeton for a time, but left in 1805 to read law in Richmond with ...
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Fortas, Abe (1910-1982), lawyer and associate justice of the Supreme Court
Donna Grear Parker
Fortas, Abe (19 June 1910–05 April 1982), lawyer and associate justice of the Supreme Court, was born in Memphis, Tennessee, the son of Woolfe Fortas, a cabinetmaker, and Rachel Berzansky. Although Abe’s father was born in Russia and his mother in Lithuania, the couple immigrated to the United States from England in 1905. Despite his father’s attempts to assimilate by changing his name to William, his mother raised her children as Orthodox Jews in an overwhelmingly Protestant community. Neither well off nor poverty-stricken, young Fortas supplemented his family’s income by working in a shoe store, giving violin lessons, and playing fiddle with local bands. His amateur violin skills helped finance Fortas’s undergraduate studies at Southwestern College in Memphis, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1930. At the age of twenty, he enrolled at Yale University Law School on scholarship, where he served as editor in chief of the law journal and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1933....
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Goldberg, Arthur Joseph (1908-1990), lawyer, jurist, and diplomat
David L. Stebenne
Goldberg, Arthur Joseph (08 August 1908–19 January 1990), lawyer, jurist, and diplomat, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Rebecca (maiden name unknown) and Joseph Goldberg, a peddler. Goldberg grew up in an immigrant slum on Chicago’s West Side, where he led a life filled with hard work. Thanks to extraordinary intelligence and drive, he managed to graduate from Benjamin Harrison Public High School in 1924, the first member of his family ever to get that much schooling. He then attended Crane Junior College, from which he soon made his way into Northwestern Law School. During his three years there, Goldberg compiled the best academic record in the school’s history up to that point and served as editor of the law review, while continuing to work part-time. He earned his bachelor of law degree in 1928 and his doctor of science in law degree one year later. He then joined the Chicago firm of Pritzger and Pritzger. In 1931 he married Dorothy Kurgans, an art student he had met at Northwestern; they were to have two children....
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Harlan, John Marshall (1899-1971), lawyer and Supreme Court justice
Norman Dorsen
Harlan, John Marshall (20 May 1899–29 December 1971), lawyer and Supreme Court justice, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of John Maynard Harlan, a lawyer, and Elizabeth Palmer Flagg. He was born into a wealthy family that had achieved distinction in the law. His great-grandfather ...
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Harlan, John Marshall (1899-1971)
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John Marshall Harlan. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-90260).
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Jackson, Robert Houghwout (1892-1954), lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice
Douglas P. Woodlock
Jackson, Robert Houghwout (13 February 1892–09 October 1954), lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania, the son of William Eldred Jackson, a farmer and small businessman, and Angelina Houghwout. When Jackson was five, the family moved to Frewsburg in western New York state near Jamestown. Jackson began his legal career at the age of eighteen, immediately after high school, as a clerk to his cousin Frank H. Mott, a prominent Jamestown lawyer active in the Democratic party. Although he did attend the Albany Law School for a year, Jackson described himself as “a vestigial remnant of the system which permitted one to come to the bar by way of apprenticeship in a law office.” He was the last member of the Supreme Court of the United States to become a lawyer in that fashion....
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Jackson, Robert Houghwout (1892-1954)
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Robert H. Jackson Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-102574).
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Marshall, Thurgood (02 July 1908–24 January 1993), civil rights lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice
Mark Tushnet
Marshall, Thurgood (02 July 1908–24 January 1993), civil rights lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice, was born Thoroughgood Marshall in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of William Canfield Marshall, a dining-car waiter and club steward whose grandfather had been enslaved, and Norma Arica Williams, an elementary school teacher. He shortened his name to the simpler Thurgood in second grade. Growing up in a solid middle-class environment, Marshall was an outgoing and sometimes rebellious student who first encountered the Constitution when he was required to read it as punishment for classroom misbehavior. Marshall’s parents wanted him to become a dentist, as his brother did, but Marshall was not interested in the science courses he took at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated with honors in 1930. He married Vivian “Buster” Burey in 1929; they had no children....
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Marshall, Thurgood (02 July 1908–24 January 1993)
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Thurgood Marshall, c. 1935–1940. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-84486).
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Powell, Lewis F., Jr. (1907-1998), Supreme Court justice
Tinsley E. Yarbrough
Powell, Lewis F., Jr. (19 November 1907–25 August 1998), Supreme Court justice, was born Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., the son of Lewis Franklin Powell and Mary Lewis Gwathmey Powell, in Suffolk, Virginia, but spent most of his life in Richmond. The descendant of one of the original Jamestown settlers, Powell graduated from McGuire's University School in 1925, then attended the college of Washington and Lee University, where he was manager of the football team, managing editor of the student newspaper, and student body president, while also compiling an outstanding academic record. Following graduation and election to Phi Beta Kappa in 1929, he remained at Washington and Lee for law school, earning an LL.B. and admission to the Virginia bar in 1931. Delaying law practice for a year, Powell received a master of law degree at Harvard, where his professors included ...
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