Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr. (July 20, 1894 – September 10, 1949) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1943 to 1949. The ninth and final justice appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he is best known for his impassioned defenses of civil liberties. Rutledge favored broad interpretations of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause, and he argued that the Bill of Rights applied in its totality to the states. He participated in several noteworthy cases involving the intersection of individual freedoms and the government's wartime powers. Rutledge served on the Court until his death at the age of fifty-five. Legal scholars have generally thought highly of the justice, although the brevity of his tenure has minimized his impact on history.
Born in Cloverport, Kentucky, Rutledge attended several colleges and universities, graduating with a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1922. He briefly practiced law in Boulder, Colorado, before accepting a position on the faculty of the University of Colorado Law School. Rutledge also taught law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Missouri, of which he became the dean; he later served as dean of the University of Iowa College of Law. As an academic, he vocally opposed Supreme Court decisions striking down parts of the New Deal and argued in favor of President Roosevelt's unsuccessful attempt to expand the Court. Rutledge's support of Roosevelt's policies brought him to the President's attention: he was considered as a potential Supreme Court nominee and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where he developed a record as a supporter of individual liberties and the New Deal. When Justice James F. Byrnes resigned from the Supreme Court, Roosevelt nominated Rutledge to take his place. The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Rutledge by voice vote, and he took the oath of office on February 15, 1943.
Rutledge's jurisprudence placed a strong emphasis on the protection of civil liberties. In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), he authored an influential dissenting opinion in support of the separation of church and state. He sided with Jehovah's Witnesses seeking to invoke the First Amendment in cases such as West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) and Murdock v. Pennsylvania (1943); his majority opinion in Thomas v. Collins (1945) endorsed a broad interpretation of the Free Speech Clause. In a famed dissent in the wartime case of In re Yamashita (1946), Rutledge voted to void the war crimes conviction of the Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita, condemning in ringing terms a trial that, in his view, violated the basic principles of justice and fairness enshrined in the Constitution. By contrast, he joined the majority in two cases—Hirabayashi v. United States (1943) and Korematsu v. United States (1944)—that upheld the Roosevelt administration's decision to intern tens of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. In other cases, Rutledge fervently supported broad due process rights in criminal cases, and he opposed discrimination against women, racial minorities, and the poor.
Rutledge was among the most liberal justices ever to serve on the Supreme Court. He favored a flexible and pragmatic approach to the law that prioritized the rights of individuals. On the Court, his views aligned most often with those of Justice Frank Murphy. Rutledge died in 1949, having suffered a massive stroke, after six years' service on the Supreme Court. President Harry S. Truman appointed the considerably more conservative Sherman Minton to replace him. Although Rutledge frequently found himself in dissent during his lifetime, many of his views received greater acceptance during the era of the Warren Court.
Early life and education
Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr. was born just outside of Cloverport, Kentucky, on July 20, 1894, to Mary Lou ( Wigginton) and Wiley Blount Rutledge. Wiley Sr., a native of western Tennessee, was a fundamentalist Baptist clergyman who believed firmly in the literal inerrancy of the Bible. He attended seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and then moved with his wife to pastor a church in Cloverport. At Maryville, Rutledge participated vigorously in debate; he argued in support of Woodrow Wilson and against the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt.
Realizing that his talents did not lie in chemistry, Rutledge resumed his original plan to study law. The difficulty of simultaneously working and studying put a serious strain on his health, and, by 1915, he had developed a life-threatening case of tuberculosis. Upon recovering, he moved with his wife to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he took a position teaching high school business classes. He taught a wide variety of classes, and his colleagues commented that he was experiencing "very considerable success".
During his time in academia, Rutledge did not function primarily as a scholar: for instance, he only published two articles in law reviews. Rutledge frequently weighed in on questions of public importance, supporting academic freedom and free speech at Washington University and opposing the Supreme Court's approach to child labor laws. His opinion for the court in Wood v. United States reversed a conviction for robbery that had been secured after the defendant pleaded guilty at a preliminary hearing without having been informed of his right against self-incrimination. As a result of Roosevelt's many previous appointments to the Court, there was "no obvious successor, no obvious political debt to be paid", according to the scholar Henry J. Abraham. Some prominent figures, including Justices Felix Frankfurter and Harlan F. Stone, encouraged Roosevelt to appoint the distinguished jurist Learned Hand. However, the President was uncomfortable appointing the seventy-one-year-old Hand due to his age, as Roosevelt feared the appearance of hypocrisy due to the fact that he had cited the advanced age of Supreme Court justices to justify his plan to expand the Court. Those four senators—North Dakota's William Langer, West Virginia's Chapman Revercomb, Montana's Burton K. Wheeler, and Michigan's Homer S. Ferguson—abstained due to uneasiness about Rutledge's support for Roosevelt's court-expansion plan. He found it challenging to write opinions, and his writing style has been criticized as unnecessarily prolix and difficult to read. His approach to the law strongly emphasized the preservation of civil liberties, Rutledge voted more often than any of his colleagues in favor of individuals who brought suit against the government, His views particularly overlapped with those of Murphy, with whom he agreed in nearly seventy-five percent of the Court's non-unanimous cases. Rutledge's arrival the subsequent year gave that case's erstwhile dissenters a majority; in Murdock v. Pennsylvania, they overruled Jones and struck down the tax as unconstitutional. In that landmark decision, the Court reversed its previous holding in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, ruling instead that the First Amendment forbade public schools from requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Writing for a 6–3 majority that included Rutledge, Justice Jackson wrote that: "[i]f 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". According to the jurist and scholar John M. Ferren, Rutledge, by his vote in Barnette, "established himself early as a concerned protector of religious freedom". Writing for the majority, Justice Black concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Establishment Clause, meaning that it applied to the states as well as to the federal government. Concurring separately, he argued for a broader definition of due process, decrying the Court's willingness to permit "selective departure[s]" from the "scheme of ordered personal liberty established by the Bill of Rights" in other cases. Rutledge dissented, concluding that the court in the District of Columbia had jurisdiction because the person having custody over the prisoners—the Attorney General—was located there. He dissented in Adamson v. California, in which the Court, by a vote of 5–4, held that the Fifth Amendment's protection against forced self-incrimination did not apply to the states.
Wartime cases
In re Yamashita
alt=Dozens are seated in a courtroom; a witness is testifying|thumb|Testimony is heard at the war crimes trial of Tomoyuki Yamashita in Manila on October 29, 1945. In Rutledge's view, Yamashita's conviction was the result of egregious violations of the Constitution.
In the 1946 case of In re Yamashita, Rutledge rendered an opinion that was later characterized by Ferren as "one of the Court's truly great, and influential, dissents". Since the United States had not yet signed a peace treaty with Japan, he maintained that the Articles of War permitted military trials to be conducted without complying with the Constitution's due process requirements.
Rutledge wrote privately that he felt the case would "outrank Dred Scott in the annals of the Court". In his dissent, he rejected the majority's holding that the Fifth Amendment was inapplicable, writing that: "[n]ot heretofore has it been held that any human being is beyond its universally protecting spread in the guaranty of a fair trial in the most fundamental sense. That door is dangerous to open. I will have no part in opening it. For once it is ajar, even for enemy belligerents, it can be pushed back wider for others, perhaps ultimately for all." In closing, he quoted the words of Thomas Paine: "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." The Supreme Court, with the agreement of Rutledge, conferred its imprimatur on this decision in the cases of Hirabayashi v. United States and Korematsu v. United States. Green also argues that the modern condemnation of the Court's decision benefits substantially from hindsight: after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the threat of sabotage appeared serious, and the government had hidden information that would have raised doubts about the accuracy of its assessments. His dissent in Goesaert v. Cleary, according to Ferren, constituted "the first modern gender discrimination opinion". Writing that the Equal Protection Clause "require[s] lawmakers to refrain from invidious distinctions of the sort drawn by the statute challenged in this case", Rutledge maintained that Michigan's law was arbitrary and irrational. Writing for the Court in Bob-Lo Excursion Co. v. Michigan, he ruled against a ferry company that had been charged with violating a Michigan civil rights law by refusing to serve African-Americans. In a narrow ruling, Rutledge held that, although Michigan was technically regulating foreign commerce, the statute imposed no serious burden on it because the island was for all practical purposes a part of Detroit. Raised a Southern Baptist, Rutledge later became a Christian humanist; his religious views resembled those of Unitarianism. On August 27, while in Ogunquit, Maine, he experienced a hemorrhagic stroke and was hospitalized in nearby York Harbor. The fifty-five-year-old justice drifted in and out of consciousness and, on September 10, died. Rutledge's funeral service, conducted by A. Powell Davies, was held at All Souls' Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. on September 14. A headstone in Rutledge's memory was placed at Mountain View Cemetery in Boulder, Colorado, but the grave is empty: as of 2008, his physical remains are held at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Suitland, Maryland, pending further instructions from his family. Rutledge's death was almost simultaneous with that of Murphy; Truman's appointments of Sherman Minton and Tom C. Clark, respectively, to replace them led to a considerably more conservative Court. Observing that "short tenure naturally tends to depress rankings", the scholar William G. Ross suggested that "bright and able persons" such as Rutledge "would have received higher rankings—perhaps even as 'greats'—if their tenures had not been cut short".