They Don’t Make ’Em Like That Anymore

G. Edward White’s new biography explores the life of Robert H. Jackson, a Supreme Court justice revered by jurists from both ends of the political spectrum.

By Rodger D. CitronMarch 20, 2026

• Law

• Biography & Autobiography

THE REPUTATIONS OF former Supreme Court justices wax and wane depending on the politics of the moment. The sun seems to have set on Justice William J. Brennan Jr., celebrated at his retirement in 1990 as the playmaker of the liberal Warren Court and champion of the “Living Constitution” approach to jurisprudence. Similarly, the moderate conservatism of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has been swept away by the current court, consigning her judicial compromises and incrementalist approach to the backbench.

Meanwhile, Justice Robert H. Jackson has become (even more) revered. A justice from every bloc on the current Supreme Court praised Jackson at his or her confirmation hearing. It is not surprising that John Roberts professed his admiration for Jackson in 2005—in the 1980s, Roberts clerked for then–associate justice William Rehnquist, who had clerked for Jackson. But surely it is striking that President Barack Obama’s second nominee, Elena Kagan, named Jackson one of her “favorite figures in Supreme Court history” in 2010 and that President Donald Trump’s first nominee, Neil Gorsuch, called him a “judge’s judge” in 2017.*

Jackson rose to prominence through his service in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Justice Department, including as solicitor general and attorney general, and was appointed to the court by FDR in 1941. He served on the court for just 13 years, however, until his death in 1954. Why, then, was Jackson name-checked by so many of this century’s high court nominees?

Jackson was an extraordinarily able and accomplished attorney before joining the court. Among other things, he won 38 of the 44 cases he argued at the Supreme Court over a two-year period as solicitor general. In addition, Jackson was an eloquent writer. In his judicial opinions, he marshaled facts vividly and often employed memorable turns of phrase to support the incisive legal analysis in his opinions. And perhaps most important in the context of a confirmation hearing, Jackson continues to be an icon of judicial independence. Though he was FDR’s champion in the executive branch, Jackson did not reflexively vote in favor of the Roosevelt or Harry S. Truman administrations once he became a justice. Moreover, Jackson did not vote with a particular wing or bloc of the court.

For those who wish to learn more about Jackson, G. Edward White’s recent biography, Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment (2025), provides a brisk account of the Upstate New York lawyer turned FDR administration advocate turned Supreme Court justice. Jackson wrestled with some of the most interesting and consequential legal issues of the 20th century, including the federal government’s authority during the New Deal, the legality of FDR’s exclusion order applicable only to people of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and the constitutionality of segregation in public schools in 1954. This is just a partial list, omitting what Jackson viewed as “the high point of [his] experience”—serving as the United States’ chief prosecutor at the first international war crimes trial held shortly after World War II in Nuremberg, Germany.

As the Supreme Court wrestles with the scope of presidential power under the current Trump administration, Jackson’s life and work continue to be germane more than 70 years after his death. And, as White shows, Jackson was eminently human, with a constellation of qualities—socially gregarious but essentially private, an inveterate advocate who responded to certain disputes in intensely personal terms—that make him a fascinating subject for a biography.

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Part of the appeal of Jackson’s story is that he ended up so far from where he began. The defining aspect of Jackson’s upbringing is that it was rural. As White relates, Jackson was born in Northwest Pennsylvania in 1892 “on the same site [the family farm] as his father and grandfather.” When Jackson was five, his parents moved to Frewsburg, New York, about 25 miles away. Self-sufficiency was the norm. It was, by Jackson’s account, “an environment that was truly and deeply democratic—democratic in an economic and social as well as in a political sense.”

After graduating from the local schools in Frewsburg, Jackson spent a supplementary year at Jamestown High School and decided to become a lawyer. Rather than immediately attending law school, he accepted an apprenticeship with two Jamestown lawyers. “At the time,” White notes, “it was not uncommon for aspiring lawyers to take apprenticeship positions and ‘read’ for a bar examination with the guidance of lawyers in their offices.” As part of his preparation, Jackson studied at Albany Law School for a year and completed the program without receiving a diploma because he was only 20 years old.

After passing the bar exam, Jackson became the quintessential general-practice lawyer, focusing on trial work. Except for a temporary move to Buffalo in 1918 to represent the International Railway Company in litigation, Jackson lived and built his law practice in Jamestown. His clients included individuals as well as a telephone company, a railway company that operated a local trolley line, and a public utility company. White notes that Jackson “represented a diverse array of clients” to protect his financial independence. Along the way, Jackson married Irene Alice Gerhardt in 1916. They had two children: a son, William, and a daughter, Mary.

Although Jackson strongly preferred the practice of law to organizational politics, he was also an active Democrat. He gave speeches and wrote editorials in support of FDR when he ran for governor of New York in 1928. Four years later, in the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt easily defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover to become president.

In 1934, Jackson took his first position in FDR’s administration at the Bureau of Internal Revenue (now the Internal Revenue Service). A “major challenge awaited” Jackson, according to White: the case against former treasury secretary Andrew W. Mellon, one of the wealthiest men in the nation. Initially, the Justice Department wanted to prosecute Mellon criminally for tax fraud, but the case went nowhere.

Jackson recommended bringing a civil case for unpaid taxes against Mellon and tried the case before the Board of Tax Appeals. One of the contested issues included Mellon’s conduct regarding paintings donated to a tax-exempt trust that were to be placed in a public gallery. As Jackson established during the trial, many of the paintings remained at Mellon’s home in Pittsburgh or in other personal locations, and Mellon testified on cross-examination that it was “substantially true” that he had not made a commitment to build or endow a gallery for the public. Though Mellon prevailed on many of the issues before the board, he nevertheless was found liable for a substantial sum. In addition, the case spurred Mellon to move forward with building a national art gallery in Washington, DC—one that still stands today—and showed how the very wealthy could manipulate the tax laws to avoid paying taxes. FDR was “extremely pleased” with the outcome, White notes.

When Jackson moved his family to Washington, he did not think he would spend the rest of his life there. But, as Jackson said in his Columbia University oral history decades later, “I got into the Mellon case and one thing after another. It wasn’t easy to let go.” After his stint at the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Jackson served in the Securities and Exchange Commission and then the Justice Department, first as assistant attorney general for the Tax Division and then for the Antitrust Division.

About four years after he arrived in Washington, Jackson was appointed solicitor general, the position for which he was most suited and at which he excelled. Jackson took this position at a propitious time. FDR’s efforts to increase the size of the Supreme Court in response to its hostility to New Deal legislation had faltered by the time Jackson became solicitor general. (Jackson had not been enthusiastic about the “court-packing” plan but nevertheless supported it publicly; according to White, Jackson argued “that current Court majorities were insisting on rigid, permanent, and legalistic definitions of constitutional terms” and that Congress had “undoubted authority […] to change the number of justices sitting on the Court.”) Nevertheless, the court had changed its tack by 1938, due in part to FDR’s appointment of Hugo Black and Stanley Reed as justices. More appointments, including Jackson’s, would follow.

Even with the wind at his back when arguing on behalf of the federal government, Jackson’s performance as solicitor general was objectively outstanding. As noted earlier, Jackson won more than 85 percent of the 44 cases he personally argued before the court. Indeed, Justice Louis Brandeis commented to Justice Felix Frankfurter that “Jackson should be Solicitor General for life.” Jackson loved the job, which aligned with his abilities and temperament. “For Jackson,” White elaborates, “advocacy was a professional rather than a political pursuit.” Further, “his work as solicitor general combined legal, institutional, and policy sophistication with a sense of which arguments went to the core of a dispute.”

During this time, Jackson also was an informal adviser to FDR, who kept promoting him. In 1940, Jackson succeeded Frank Murphy as attorney general. The political aspects of the job—appointments, pardons, and the like—were time-consuming and unsatisfying. At the same time, with the war in Europe, Jackson became involved in matters of international law, including the United States’ “destroyers-for-bases” agreement with Great Britain in 1940 and the Lend-Lease Act passed by Congress a year later. Under the latter, the US provided “open financial support to European nations seeking to counter German aggression” and eventually “encompassed munition transfers,” according to White. In the summer of 1941, months before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt appointed Jackson to the Supreme Court.

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Jackson’s professional life after joining the court can be divided into three parts: his service on the court from 1941 through 1945, his absence to serve as the chief prosecutor at the first Nuremberg trial, and his return to the court in 1946 and tenure until his death in 1954. The first stint was disenchanting. The high court seemed like a backwater. The Monday following the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, White observes, “the Court heard two cases raising the question of whether members of country clubs were taxable on their greens fees at golf courses.” In his oral history, Jackson recalled his frustration “about hearing such a damn petty question … with the world in flames.”

Jackson was also disappointed to learn of the extent to which politics, rather than law, seemed to guide several justices’ decisions. Although Harlan Fiske Stone was chief justice, Hugo Black had emerged as the leader of the court’s liberal bloc and, in Jackson’s view, prioritized results over reasoning. Jackson and Black clashed on a number of occasions, revealing Jackson’s capacity to be thin-skinned. In several labor cases, White details, Jackson viewed his dispute with Black in personal terms, insisting that only one view was correct as a matter of principle—his own.

However, although Jackson and Black were on opposite sides in Korematsu v. United States (1944)—perhaps the most infamous Supreme Court decision of the 20th century—Jackson did not take their disagreement in that case personally. Black wrote the opinion for the court upholding the exclusion order, concluding that it was not motivated by race. Accordingly, the court was required to defer to the judgment of the nation’s military leaders regarding the need for the order.

Three justices dissented, including Jackson. On the one hand, White explains, “Jackson did not believe that courts should review the decisions of military officials in times of war.” On the other hand, the exclusion order was “flagrantly unconstitutional” because it singled out “persons of Japanese ancestry alone.” Accordingly, Jackson argued that the court should have refrained from review; having decided to engage in review, however, it should have invalidated the order. Jackson explained:

[O]nce a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

One other case from Jackson’s tenure on the court during World War II is particularly worth noting: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) or, as it became known, the “flag salute” case, which overruled the decision in Minersville School District v. Gobitis. In 1940, the court had upheld a Pennsylvania law establishing a compulsory flag salute ceremony in public schools in Gobitis, with only then-justice Stone dissenting. The opinion did not sit well, however, and Jackson wrote for a total of six justices to overrule Gobitis three years later. Barnette includes one of the most well-known passages from Jackson’s writing, his paean to freedom of conscience: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in […] matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

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Despite the occasional consequential case during World War II, Jackson continued to be unhappy on the court. Hence his enthusiasm for serving as the United States’ chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leaders held after World War II. Jackson did not ask Chief Justice Stone for permission to be absent from the court; instead, he accepted the position and then informed Stone of his plans. (Had there been sufficient opposition, Jackson would have resigned from the court.)

Jackson served as both architect of and advocate at the trials. In 1945, the idea of a war crimes trial before an international tribunal was novel and viewed skeptically by some, including Stone. Jackson played a central role in setting up the four-nation court and developing the rules for the trials. Most important was Jackson’s conviction that the trials not be mere show trials. Defendants would be represented by counsel, afforded procedural rights, and given a genuine opportunity at acquittal.

Jackson fully believed in two fundamental aspects of the prosecution: (1) the Nazi leaders constituted a criminal enterprise and (2) prosecutions under the rule of law would deter “wars of aggression” in the future. Jackson’s views were reflected in his eloquent opening statement, in which he stated that “civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance.” Jackson’s remarks were well received and continue to be studied today.

In the Nuremberg courtroom, Jackson sparred with Hermann Goering, the highest Nazi leader on trial. Though some press reports at the time were critical of Jackson’s performance, suggesting that Goering outmaneuvered his interlocutor, White highlights successful aspects of the cross-examination. “[I]n the end,” White suggests, “Jackson’s invitations to Goering to discourse about the goals and plans of the Nazis may have temporarily resulted in giving Goering opportunities to promulgate Nazi propaganda, but they ultimately revealed Goering to have been at the very center of Nazi war crimes.” The tribunal convicted Goering and sentenced him to death (a fate he avoided by taking a cyanide pill shortly before he was to be executed). Of the 22 defendants at this first trial, 19 were convicted and 12 were sentenced to death. But it was not a show trial. Three defendants were acquitted, and seven received prison sentences.

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Before Jackson returned to the Supreme Court in 1946, he made public his clash with Black over the latter’s refusal to recuse himself and to personally account for his refusal to recuse in a labor case involving Black’s close friend and former law partner. The case, Jewell Ridge Coal Corp. v. United Mine Workers of America, had been decided a year earlier by a 5–4 vote, with Black voting for the prevailing party represented by his friend. The controversy erupted in public after Chief Justice Stone died in April 1946. At the risk of oversimplifying what occurred, it is fair to say that both Black and Jackson sought the position of chief justice and that each jockeyed for the appointment. President Truman ended up nominating Fred Vinson, who had served in all three branches of government, to replace Stone. After Vinson was appointed, Jackson publicly detailed his criticism of Black’s conduct. It was an extraordinary rebuke by one sitting justice of another, and it diminished the reputations of both justices and of the court as a whole.

Jackson’s experience at Nuremberg influenced his views in several important cases decided after his return to the Court. One example was his dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, a free speech case decided in 1949. Justice William O. Douglas wrote the majority opinion setting aside the “breach of peace” conviction of a suspended priest who gave a demagogic speech. Jackson drilled down on the facts in his dissent, showing that Terminiello had made numerous inflammatory remarks in a chaotic situation that drew police involvement and arguing that some order was necessary for liberty. Jackson, White observes, “quoted from both Hitler and Goebbels in his dissent, having seen echoes of their rabble-rousing tactics in Terminiello’s speech.”

Another example was Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), also known as the Steel Seizure Case, in which Jackson joined five justices in invalidating Truman’s seizure of steel mills during the Korean conflict after a nationwide strike by steelworkers that year. (Though Congress had not declared war, American troops certainly were fighting one.) Truman’s executive order, the court ruled, violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. Jackson wrote an eloquent concurrence that is now generally viewed as the court’s holding in the case. In it, Jackson set out three situations in which the president may assert executive authority and found that Truman was acting at the “lowest ebb” of his power because the order was “incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress.” In rejecting Truman’s claim that the seizure was a lawful exercise of the president’s “emergency powers,” Jackson cited the experience of Germany becoming a dictatorship on the basis of the executive’s self-proclaimed “undefined emergency powers.”

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the “tariffs case,” illustrates the continuing relevance of Jackson’s concurrence. In response to the Trump administration’s contention that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authorized the president’s tariffs, Chief Justice Roberts quoted Jackson to emphasize his skepticism. “Emergency powers […] tend to kindle emergencies,” Roberts wrote. In dissent, Justice Brett Kavanaugh cited Jackson’s concurrence a number of times to support his contention that the president has more leeway to act in “external affairs” and therefore did not require more specific authorization from Congress to impose the challenged tariffs. Ultimately, the court ruled against the president by a 6–3 vote, invalidating the tariffs.

In 1952, the same year the court decided Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., it also heard oral arguments in Brown v. Board of Education. Vinson was chief justice at the time. At the conference afterwards, according to White, Jackson “began his comments by saying that being from western New York he had not encountered racial segregation, or even racial tension, before coming to Washington.” In addition, Jackson opposed segregation and believed it would dissipate “as African Americans entered the business and professional sectors of the economy.” At the same time, White reports, “Jackson could not currently find any legal support for outlawing segregation, either in the words of the Fourteenth Amendment, its history, or the Court’s precedents.”

The justices decided to hold Brown over for reargument in the 1953–54 term. Vinson died before the case could be reargued, and he was succeeded by Earl Warren, the former governor of California. Ultimately, the court arrived at its unanimous decision holding that separate but equal public schools were unconstitutional. White charts the evolution of Jackson’s views over the course of six memos he wrote. Essentially, Jackson supported desegregation but was very wary of courts becoming too involved in administering local schools. Jackson was still working on the case, including soliciting comments from his law clerk, when he suffered a heart attack in the spring of 1954. He was hospitalized for two months, leaving the hospital to be in court when Warren announced the opinion on May 17, 1954. Less than five months later, Jackson had another heart attack and died. He was 62 years old.

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It must have been daunting to write the biography of such a beautiful stylist, even for a legal historian and biographer as accomplished as White. Yet White has succeeded in the task he set himself—to “recount and analyze the major events in Jackson’s personal and professional life.” There are the inevitable quibbles. The book is repetitive, and where White raises a provocative question about Jackson’s suggestion that his confrontation with Black about the Jewell Ridge case helped prevent the court from being “a purely political instrument” of policies supported by Black, the analysis leaves at least this reviewer unsatisfied.

Nevertheless, White makes it abundantly clear why Jackson continues to be such a compelling figure today. Jackson rose to prominence through his formidable talents as an advocate, transitioned to becoming an independent and impressive judge, and left a lasting mark on our constitutional and international law jurisprudence. His concurrence in the Steel Seizure Case is as apt today as ever. An acquiescent Congress seems willing to cede President Trump just about any powers he claims. The perpetual question before the current Supreme Court is whether it will protect the separation of powers and check the president when the executive branch oversteps its authority as it did in Learning Resources, Inc. or, as so many of the court’s rulings on the emergency docket suggest, allow Trump to unilaterally do as he pleases.

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Notes

* Jackson featured in three other current justices’ confirmation hearings. Samuel Alito called Jackson his “hero” in 2006. In 2009, Sonia Sotomayor commended Jackson’s concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer as the best approach to analyzing executive branch power. And in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second nominee, commended Jackson as “one of our greatest justices.”