Advice from Justice Jackson.

• Position: Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

Country lawyer. Solicitor General. Attorney General. Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Having neither attended college nor graduated from law school, Robert H. Jackson lived greatly in the law nonetheless.

He spent the first twenty years of his professional life practicing law in the small town where he grew up. Describing later what he called the "county seat lawyer," Jackson might have been describing himself:

He "read law" in the Commentaries of Blackstone and Kent and not by the case system. He resolved problems by what he called "first principles." He did not specialize, nor did he pick and choose clients. He rarely declined service to worthy ones because of inability to pay. (1) Jackson was that kind of country lawyer until President Roosevelt called him to Washington in 1934 to be the general counsel for the IRS. Thus began his two decades of public lawyering.

Today Jackson's name often calls to mind his judicial opinions. We read him speaking for the majority in the second flag-salute case:

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 politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. (2) And we read him speaking for himself in one of the Japanese-internment cases:

Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country.... Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. (3) Jackson's powerful words still carry us with him to his conclusions. Back of his judicial writing, however, is the advocate's craft, and Jackson was tightly admired as one of the greatest appellate advocates of his generation.

Consider the roughly two years he spent as Solicitor General. As Jackson's last law clerk put it, "if ever a job sought out the man and the man found his proper niche, it was so with the Solicitor Generalship and Robert Jackson." (4) He once argued seven cases in our highest court in ten working days. And don't forget, those were the days when each side received an hour to argue the case. Adding in the handful of arguments he made as Attorney General, Jackson lost six cases at the Supreme Court and...