A Judicial Giant Questions Use of Lawsuits
for Legislative Purposes

My father went to school in Frewsburg, New York, with Robert H. Jackson, who went on to become a country lawyer in the Jamestown area. Dad was very proud of his schoolmate, who later served as Solicitor General, Attorney General, and a Supreme Court Justice of the United States. Justice Jackson, on leave, was the Representative of the United States and Chief Counsel “in preparing and prosecuting charges of atrocities and war crimes against such of the leaders of the European Axis powers... as the United States may agree with any of the United Nations to bring to trial before an international military tribunal.”

On resumption of his judicial duties, one of Justice Jackson’s last judicial actions was to interrupt his rehabilitation from a heart attack and join his Supreme Court colleagues on the bench in unanimously rendering Brown v. Board of Education.

He passed on shortly after that decision was pronounced, but his record reflects respect for the interpretation that it stood for the fundamental principle that racial discrimination of any kind in public education is unconstitutional. This interpretation is supported by the Brown Court’s simultaneous ruling in consolidated case Bolling v. Sharpe, where it found the racially discriminatory assignment of blacks to particular schools for the purpose of segregation to be so unjustifiable as to be violative of due process, adding: