Jackson, Robert H. (1892–1954)

• Author: Michael E. Parrish
• Pages: 1410-1411

Page 1410

The orderly, middle-class world of Jamestown, New York, the economic calamity of the Great Depression, and the horrors of Nazi Germany?these were the crucial experiences that shaped the jurisprudence of Robert Houghwout Jackson, the only Supreme Court Justice to serve both as SOLICITOR GENERAL and ATTORNEY GENERAL of the United States, and the last to learn his law initially through the old-fashioned apprentice method.

Appointed to the Court by FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT in 1941 and facing the most important constitutional issues of the post-Depression era?the scope of federal economic management and the nationalization of the BILL OF RIGHTS?Jackson helped to accelerate the former but resisted the latter. In alliance with his close friend and colleague FELIX FRANKFURTER, he often found himself locked in combat between 1941 and 1954 with Justices HUGO L. BLACK and WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS, the ideological leaders of the Court's liberal block.

Few Justices in the Court's history articulated a more robust version of economic nationalism than Justice Jackson who, despite his small-town heritage and solicitude for independent entrepreneurship, supported consistently the expansion of federal ECONOMIC REGULATION and the growth of an integrated national marketplace, which soon became dominated by giant CORPORATIONS. Jackson wrote a sweeping validation of congressional authority under the COMMERCE CLAUSE in WICKARD V. FILBURN (1942), and he also used that provision absent federal law in H. P. Hood & Sons v. DuMond (1949) to strike down state regulations that insulated local economic activities from the rigors of interstate competition.

The crisis of the Great Depression convinced Jackson of the dangers of both laissez-faire and economic Balkanization. His later confrontation with Nazism when he served as chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg persuaded him of the dangers posed to human freedom by the growth of a monolithic police state. His firm commitment to economic nationalism never wavered, except near the end of his life in situations where the federal government began to employ the COMMERCE CLAUSE in an effort to regulate more than traditional economic activities. A year before his death, for example, Jackson narrowly construed a federal anticrime statute, voting to sustain the dismissal of INDICTMENTS for failure to register as dealers in gambling machines in United States v. Five Gambling Devices (1953). In the course of...