John Marshall Harlan (May
20, 1899 – December 29, 1971) was an American
jurist who
served as an Associate
Justice of the Supreme Court
from 1955 to 1971. His namesake was his
grandfather
John Marshall
Harlan, another associate justice who served from 1877 to
1911.
Harlan was
a student at Upper Canada
College
and Appleby College
and then at Princeton University
. He continued his education at Balliol College,
Oxford
. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1923 Harlan
worked in the law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland while
studying at New York Law
School
. Later he served as Assistant
U.S.
Attorney for
the Southern District of New York and as Special Assistant
Attorney General of New York. In 1954 Harlan was appointed to the
United
States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and a year
later president
Dwight Eisenhower
nominated Harlan to the United States Supreme Court following the
death of Justice
Robert H.
Jackson.
Harlan is often characterized as a member of the conservative wing
of the
Warren Court. He advocated a
limited role for the judiciary, remarking that the Supreme Court
should not be considered "a general haven for reform movements". In
general, Harlan adhered more closely to
precedent, and was more reluctant to overturn
legislation, than many of his colleagues on the Court. He strongly
disagreed with the doctrine of
incorporation, which held
that the provisions of the
federal
Bill of Rights applied to the state governments, not merely the
Federal. At the same time, he advocated a broad
interpretation of the
Fourteenth
Amendment's
Due Process
Clause, arguing that it protected a wide range of rights not
expressly mentioned in the
United States Constitution.
Harlan is sometimes called the "
great
dissenter" of the Warren Court, and has been described as one
of the most influential Supreme Court justices in the twentieth
century. Justice Harlan was gravely ill when he retired from the
Supreme Court on September 23, 1971. He died from spinal cancer
three months later, on December 29, 1971. After Harlan's
retirement,
President Nixon appointed
William Rehnquist to replace
him.
Early life and career
John
Marshall Harlan was born on May 20, 1899 in Chicago
, Illinois
. He
was the son of John Maynard Harlan, a Chicago lawyer and
politician, and Elizabeth Flagg. He had three sisters.
Historically, Harlan's family had been politically active. His
forebear, George Harlan, served as one of governors of Delaware
during the seventeenth century; his great-grandfather,
James Harlan, was a congressman
during the 1830s; his grandfather, also
John Marshall Harlan, was an associate
justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911; and
his uncle,
James S. Harlan, was attorney general of
Puerto Rico and then chairman of the Interstate
Commerce Commission.
In his
younger years, Harlan attended The Latin
School of Chicago
. He later attended two boarding high schools
in the Toronto Area, Canada
: Upper Canada
College
and Appleby College
. Upon graduation from Appleby, Harlan returned
to the U.S. and in 1916 enrolled at Princeton University
. There, he was a member of the
Ivy Club, served as an editor of
The Daily Princetonian, and was
class president during his junior and senior years.
After graduating from
the university in 1920, he received a Rhodes Scholarship, which he used to
attend Balliol
College, Oxford
. He studied jurisprudence at Oxford for
three years, returning from England in 1923.
Upon his return to
the United States, he began work with the law firm of Root, Clark,
Buckner & Howland (now known as Dewey & LeBoeuf), one of the leading
law firms in the country, while studying law at New York Law
School
. He received his law degree in 1924 and
earned admission to the bar in 1925.
Between 1925 and 1927, Harlan served as Assistant
U.S. Attorney for
the
Southern District of
New York, heading the district's
Prohibition unit. He prosecuted
Harry M. Daugherty, former United States Attorney
General.
In 1928, he was appointed Special Assistant
Attorney General of New
York, in which capacity he investigated a scandal involving
sewer construction in Queens
. He
prosecuted
Maurice E. Connolly, the Queens
borough president, for his involvement in
the affair. In 1930, Harlan returned to his old law firm, becoming
a partner one year later. At the firm, he served as chief assistant
for senior partner
Emory Buckner and
followed him into public service when Buckner was appointed United
States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
As one of "Buckner's
Boy Scouts", eager young Assistant United States Attorneys, Harlan
worked on Prohibition cases, and swore off drinking except when the
prosecutors visited the Harlan family fishing camp in Quebec
, where
Prohibition did not apply. Harlan remained in public service
until 1930, and then returned to his firm. Buckner had also
returned to the firm, and after his death, Harlan become the
leading
trial lawyer at the firm.
As a trial lawyer Harlan was involved in a number of famous cases.
One such case was the conflict over the estate left after the death
in 1931 of Ella Wendel, who had no heirs and left almost all her
wealth estimated at 30–100 million to churches and charities.
However a number of claimants, filed suits in state and federal
courts demanding a part of her fortune. Most of the claimants were
imposters; Harlan acted as the main defender of her estate and will
as well as the chief negotiator. Eventually a settlement among
lawful claimants was reached in 1933. In the following years Harlan
specialized in corporate law dealing with the cases like
Randall v. Bailey, which was about the
interpretation of a state law governing distribution of corporate
dividends.
In 1940, he represented the New York
Board of Higher Education in its unsuccessful effort to retain
Bertrand Russell on the faculty of
the City College
of New York
; Russell was declared "morally unfit" to
teach. The future justice also represented boxer
Gene Tunney in a breach of contract suit brought
by a would-be fight manager, a matter settled out of court.
In 1937, Harlan was one of five founders of the controversial
Pioneer Fund, a group associated with
eugenics advocacy, and served on its board
for long time. He, however, never played any significant role in
the fund.
During
World War II, Harlan volunteered
for military duty, serving as a
colonel in
the
United States Army Air
Force from 1943 to 1945. He was the chief of the
Operational Analysis Section of the
Eighth Air Force in England.
He won the Legion
of Merit from the United States, and the Croix de guerre from both France
and Belgium
. In 1946 Harlan returned to private law
practice representing
Du Pont family
family members against a federal antitrust lawsuit. In 1951,
however, he returned to public service, serving as Chief Counsel to
the New York State Crime Commission, where he investigated
relationship between organized crime and the state government as
well as illegal gambling activities in New York and other areas.
During this time Harlan also served as chairman of a committee of
the
Association of
the Bar of the City of New York. Later he was elected vice
president of it. Harlan's main specialization at that time was
corporate and
anti-trust law.
Personal life
In 1928, Harlan married Ethel Andrews, who was the daughter of a
Yale Colonial History professor. This was the second marriage for
her. Ethel was originally married to a New York architect Henry K.
Murphy, who was twenty years her elder. After Ethel divorced Murphy
in 1927, her brother John invited her to a Christmas party at
Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland,
where she met John Harlan for the first time.
They saw each other
regularly after that party and eventually married on November 10,
1928 in Farmington, Connecticut
.
Harlan, a
Presbyterian, maintained a New York
City apartment, a summer home in Weston, Connecticut
and a fishing camp in Murray Bay, Quebec
, a lifestyle he described as "awfully tame and
correct". The justice played golf, favored tweeds, and wore
a gold watch which had belonged to the first Justice Harlan. In
addition to wearing his grandfather's watch, when he joined the
Supreme Court, he would use the same furniture with which his
grandfather had furnished his chambers.
John and Ethel Harlan had one daughter, Eva Dillingham (born on
February 2, 1932).
She is married to Frank Dillingham of
West
Redding, Connecticut
, and has five children.
Supreme Court career
On January 13, 1954,
United
States President Dwight D.
Eisenhower nominated Harlan to
the
United
States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, to fill a
vacancy created by the death of Judge
Augustus Noble Hand. He was confirmed by
the
United States Senate on
February 9, and took office on February 10. Harlan knew this court
well, as he had often appeared before it and was friendly with many
of the judges. However, his stay on the court only lasted for a
year. On January 10, 1955, President Eisenhower nominated Harlan to
the United States Supreme Court following the death of Justice
Robert H. Jackson. On being nominated, the reticent
Harlan called reporters into his chambers in New York, and stated,
in full, "I am very deeply honored." Despite the brevity of his
stay on the Second Circuit, Harlan would serve as the
Circuit
Justice responsible for the Second Circuit throughout his
Supreme Court capacity, and, in that capacity, would enjoyably
attend the Circuit's annual conference, bringing his wife and
catching up on the latest gossip.

Harlan was nominated to the Supreme
Court in 1955.
Harlan's nomination came shortly after the Supreme Court handed
down its landmark decision in
Brown v. Board of Education,
declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Chairman
of the
United States
Senate Committee on the Judiciary, James Eastland, and several
southern senators delayed his confirmation, because they
(correctly) believed that he would support desegregation of the
schools and
civil rights. Unlike almost
all previous Supreme Court nominees, Harlan appeared before the
Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions relating to his
judicial views. Every Supreme Court nominee since Harlan has been
questioned by the Judiciary Committee before confirmation. The
Senate finally confirmed him on March 17, 1955 by a vote of 71–11.
He took seat on March 28, 1955. Of the eleven senators who voted
against his appointment, nine were from the South. He was replaced
on the Second Circuit by
Joseph
Edward Lumbard.
On the Supreme Court, Harlan often voted alongside Justice
Felix Frankfurter, who was his principal
mentor on the court. Some legal scholars even viewed him as
"Frankfurter without mustard", though others recognize his own
important contributions to the evolution of the legal thought.
Harlan was an ideological adversary—but close personal friend—of
Justice
Hugo Black, with whom he
disagreed on a variety of issues, including the applicability of
the Bill of Rights to the states, the Due Process Clause, and the
Equal Protection
Clause.
Justice Harlan was very close to the
law
clerks whom he hired, and continued to take an interest in them
after they left his chambers to continue their legal careers. The
justice would advise them on their careers, hold annual reunions,
and place pictures of their children on his chambers' walls. He
would say to them of the Warren Court, "We must consider this only
temporary," that the Court had gone astray, but would soon right
itself.
Justice Harlan is remembered by people, who worked with him, for
his tolerance and civility. He treated his fellow Justices, clerks
and attorneys representing parties with respect and consideration.
While Justice Harlan often strongly objected to certain conclusions
and arguments, he never criticized other justices or anybody else
personally, and never said any disparaging words about someone's
motivations and capacity.
Dorsen, 2002, pp.
147, 156, 162. Harlan was reluctant to show emotion, and was never
heard to complain about anything. Harlan was one of the
intellectual leaders of the Warren Court. Harvard Constitutional
law expert
Paul Freund said of him:
His thinking threw light in a very introspective way on
the entire process of the judicial function.
His decisions, beyond just the vote they represented,
were sufficiently philosophical to be of enduring
interest.
He decided the case before him with that respect for
its particulars, its special features, that marks alike the honest
artist and the just judge.
Jurisprudence
Harlan's jurisprudence is often characterized as conservative. He
held
precedent to be of great importance,
adhering to the principle of
stare
decisis more closely than many of his Supreme Court
colleagues. Unlike Justice Black, he eschewed strict
textualism. While he believed that the original
intention of the Framers should play an important part in
constitutional adjudication, he also held that broad phrases like
"liberty" in the Due Process Clause could be given an evolving
interpretation.
Harlan believed that most problems should be solved by the
political process, and that the judiciary
should play only a limited role. In his dissent to
Reynolds v. Sims, he wrote:
These decisions give support to a current mistaken view
of the Constitution and the constitutional function of this
court.
This view, in short, is that every major social ill in
this country can find its cure in some constitutional principle and
that this court should take the lead in promoting reform when other
branches of government fail to act.
The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon
the public welfare nor should this court, ordained as a judicial
body, be thought of as a general haven of reform
movements.
Equal Protection Clause
The Supreme Court decided several important equal protection cases
during the first years of Harlan's career. In these cases, Harlan
regularly voted in favor of civil rights—similar to his
grandfather, the only dissenting justice in the infamous
Plessy v. Ferguson case.
He voted with the majority in
Cooper
v. Aaron, compelling defiant officials in
Arkansas
to desegregate public
schools. He joined the opinion in
Gomillion v. Lightfoot, which declared that
states could not redraw political boundaries in order to reduce the
voting power of African-Americans. Moreover, he joined the
unanimous decision in
Loving
v. Virginia,
which struck down state laws that banned interracial
marriage.
Due Process Clause
Justice Harlan advocated a broad interpretation of the
Fourteenth
Amendment's Due Process Clause. He subscribed to the doctrine
that the clause not only provided procedural guarantees, but also
protected a wide range of fundamental rights, including those that
were not specifically mentioned in the text of the Constitution.
(See
substantive due
process.) However, as Justice
Byron
White noted in his
dissenting
opinion in
Moore
v. East
Cleveland, "no one was more sensitive than Mr. Justice
Harlan to any suggestion that his approach to the Due Process
Clause would lead to judges 'roaming at large in the constitutional
field.'" Under Harlan's approach, judges would be limited in the
Due Process area by "respect for the teachings of history, solid
recognition of the basic values that underlie our society, and wise
appreciation of the great roles that the doctrines of
federalism and
separation of powers have played in
establishing and preserving American freedoms."
Harlan set forth his interpretation in an often cited dissenting
opinion to
Poe v.
Ullman, which involved a challenge to a
Connecticut
law banning the use of contraceptives. The Supreme Court
dismissed the case on technical grounds, holding that the case was
not
ripe for adjudication. Justice Harlan
dissented from the dismissal, suggesting that the Court should have
considered the merits of the case. Thereafter, he indicated his
support for a broad view of the due process clause's reference to
"liberty." He wrote, "This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated
points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom
of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms;
the freedom from unreasonable
searches and seizures; and so on. It
is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom
from all substantial arbitrary
impositions and purposeless
restraint." He suggested that the due
process clause encompassed a right to privacy, and concluded that a
prohibition on contraception violated this right.
The same law was challenged again in
Griswold v. Connecticut. This time, the
Supreme Court agreed to consider the case, and concluded that the
law violated the Constitution. However, the decision was based not
on the due process clause, but on the argument that a right to
privacy was found in the "
penumbras" of
other provisions of the Bill of Rights. Justice Harlan concurred in
the result, but criticized the Court for relying on the Bill of
Rights in reaching its decision. "The Due Process Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment stands," he wrote, "on its own bottom." The
Supreme Court would later adopt Harlan's approach, relying on the
due process clause rather than the penumbras of the Bill of Rights
in right to privacy cases such as
Roe
v. Wade, and
Lawrence v. Texas.
Harlan's interpretation of the Due Process Clause attracted the
criticism of Justice Black, who rejected the idea that the Clause
included a "substantive" component, considering this interpretation
unjustifiably broad and historically unsound. The Supreme Court has
agreed with Harlan, and has continued to apply the doctrine of
substantive due process in a wide variety of cases.
Incorporation
Justice Harlan was strongly opposed to the theory that the
Fourteenth Amendment "incorporated" the Bill of Rights—that is,
made the provisions of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states.
His opinion on the matter was opposite to that of his grandfather,
who supported the full incorporation of the Bill of Rights. When it
was originally ratified, the Bill of Rights was binding only upon
the federal government, as the Supreme Court ruled in the 1833
Barron v. Baltimore. Some jurists argued that
the Fourteenth Amendment made the entirety of the Bill of Rights
binding upon the states as well. Harlan, however, rejected this
doctrine, which he called "historically unfounded" in his
Griswold concurrence.
Instead, Justice Harlan believed that the Fourteenth Amendment's
due process clause only protected "fundamental" rights. Thus, if a
guarantee of the Bill of Rights was "fundamental" or "implicit in
the concept of ordered liberty," Harlan agreed that it applied to
the states as well as the federal government. Thus, for example,
Harlan believed that the
First
Amendment's
free speech clause
applied to the states, but that the
Fifth
Amendment's self incrimination clause did not.
Harlan's approach was largely similar to that of Justices
Benjamin Cardozo and
Felix Frankfurter. It drew criticism from
Justice Black, a proponent of the total incorporation theory. Black
claimed that the process of identifying some rights as more
"fundamental" than others was largely arbitrary, and depended on
each Justice's personal opinions.
The Supreme Court has eventually adopted some elements of Harlan's
approach, holding that only some Bill of Rights guarantees were
applicable against the states—the doctrine known as selective
incorporation. However, under Chief Justice Earl Warren during the
1960s, an increasing number of rights were deemed sufficiently
fundamental for incorporation. (Harlan regularly dissented from
these rulings.) Hence, majority of provisions of the Bill of Rights
have been extended to the states; the exceptions are the
Second
Amendment, the
Third
Amendment, the grand jury clause of the Fifth Amendment, the
Seventh
Amendment, the excessive bail provision of the Eighth
Amendment, the
Ninth
Amendment, and the
Tenth
Amendment. Thus, although the Supreme Court has agreed with
Harlan's general reasoning, the end result of its jurisprudence is
very different from what Harlan advocated.
First Amendment
Justice Harlan supported many of the Warren Court's landmark
decisions relating to the
separation of church and
state. For instance, he voted in favor of the Court's ruling
that the states could not use religious tests as qualifications for
public office in
Torcaso
v. Watkins. He
joined in
Engel v.
Vitale, which declared that
it was unconstitutional for states to require the recitation of
official
prayers in public schools.
In
Epperson v.
Arkansas, similarly,
he voted to strike down an Arkansas law banning the teaching of
evolution.
In many cases, Harlan took a fairly broad view of First Amendment
rights such as the freedom of speech and of the press, although he
thought that the First Amendment applied directly only to the
federal government. According to Harlan the freedom of speech was
among the "fundamental principals of liberty and justice" and
therefore applicable also to states, but less stringently than to
the national government. Moreover, Justice Harlan believed that
federal laws censoring "obscene" publications violated the free
speech clause. Thus, he dissented from
Roth v. United States, in which the
Supreme Court upheld the validity of a federal obscenity law. At
the same time, Harlan did not believe that the Constitution
prevented the states from censoring obscenity. He explained in his
Roth dissent:
The danger is perhaps not great if the people of one
State, through their legislature, decide that Lady Chatterley's Lover goes so
far beyond the acceptable standards of candor that it will be
deemed offensive and non-sellable, for the State next door is still
free to make its own choice.
At least we do not have one uniform
standard.
But the dangers to free thought and expression are
truly great if the Federal Government imposes a blanket ban over
the Nation on such a book.
[...] The fact that the people of one State cannot read
some of the works of D.
H.
Lawrence seems to me, if
not wise or desirable, at least acceptable.
But that no person in the United States should be
allowed to do so seems to me to be intolerable, and violative of
both the letter and spirit of the First Amendment.
Harlan concurred in
New York Times Co. v.
Sullivan,
which required public officials suing newspapers for
libel to prove that the publisher had
acted with "
actual malice." This
stringent standard made it much more difficult for public officials
to win libel cases. He did not, however, go as far as Justices Hugo
Black and
William O. Douglas, who suggested that all libel
laws were unconstitutional. In
Street v. New
York, Harlan wrote the opinion of the court, ruling that the
government could not punish an individual for insulting the
American flag. In 1969 he noted that
the Supreme Court had consistently "rejected all manner of prior
restraint on publication."
When Harlan was a Circuit Judge in 1955, he authorized the decision
upholding conviction of leaders of the
communist party (including
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn) under the
Smith Act. The ruling was based on the
previous Supreme Court's decisions, by which the Court of Appeals
was bound. Later, when he was a the Supreme Court justice, Harlan,
however, wrote an opinion overturning the conviction of communist
party activists as unconstitutional in the case known as
Yates v.
United States.
Another such case was
Watkins v. United States.
Harlan penned the
majority opinion
in
Cohen v.
California, holding
that wearing a
jacket emblazoned with the
words "Fuck the
Draft" was speech
protected by the First Amendment. His opinion was later described
by constitutional law expert Professor
Yale
Kamisar as one of the greatest ever written on freedom of
expression. In the
Cohen opinion, Harlan famously wrote
"one man's
vulgarity is another's
lyric," a quote that was later denounced by
Robert Bork as "
moral relativism".
Justice Harlan is credited for the establishing that the First
Amendment protects the freedom of association. In
NAACP v. Alabama, Justice Harlan delivered the
opinion of the court, invalidating an Alabama law that required the
NAACP to disclose membership lists. However he
did not believe that individuals were entitled to exercise their
First Amendment rights wherever they pleased. He joined in
Adderley v. Florida, which controversially upheld
a trespassing conviction for protesters who demonstrated on
government property. He dissented from
Brown v. Louisiana, in which the Court held
that protesters were entitled to engage in a sit-in at a public
library. Likewise, he disagreed with
Tinker v. Des Moines, in which the Supreme
Court ruled that students had the right to wear armbands (as a form
of protest) in public schools.
Criminal procedure
During the 1960s the Warren Court made a series of rulings
expanding the rights of criminal
defendants. In some instances, Justice Harlan
concurred in the result, while in many other cases he found himself
in dissent. Harlan was usually joined by the other moderate members
of the Court: Justices
Potter
Stewart,
Tom Clark, and
Byron White.
Most notably, Harlan dissented from Supreme Court rulings
restricting
interrogation techniques
used by law enforcement officers. For example, he dissented from
the Court's holding in
Escobedo
v. Illinois,
that the police could not refuse to honor a suspect's request to
consult with his lawyer during an interrogation. Harlan called the
rule "ill-conceived" and suggested that it "unjustifiably fetters
perfectly legitimate methods of criminal law enforcement." He
disagreed with
Miranda
v. Arizona,
which required law enforcement officials to warn a suspect of his
rights before questioning him (see
Miranda warning). He closed his dissenting
opinion with a quotation from his predecessor, Justice
Robert H. Jackson: "This Court is forever adding new
stories to the temples of constitutional law, and the temples have
a way of collapsing when one story too many is added."
In
Gideon v. Wainwright, Justice Harlan agreed
that the Constitution required states to provide attorneys for
defendants who could not afford their own counsel. However, he
believed that this requirement applied only
at
trial, and not
on appeal; thus, he
dissented from
Douglas v. California.
Harlan wrote the majority opinion
Leary v. United States—a case that
declared
Marijuana Tax Act
unconstitutional based on the
Fifth
Amendment protection against
self-incrimination.
Justice Harlan's concurrence in
Katz v. United States set forth the test
for determining whether government conduct constituted a
search. In this case the Supreme Court
held that
eavesdropping of the
petitioner's telephone conversation
constituted a search in the meaning of the Fourth Amendment and
thus required a
warrant. According to
Justice Harlan, there is a two-part requirement for a search: 1.
That the individual have a subjective expectation of privacy; and
2. That the individual's expectation of privacy is "one that
society is prepared to recognize as 'reasonable.'"
Voting rights
Justice Harlan rejected the theory that the Constitution enshrined
the so-called "
one man, one vote"
principle, or the principle that legislative districts must be
roughly equal in population. In this regard, he shared the views of
Justice Felix Frankfurter, who in
Colegrove v. Green admonished the courts to stay
out of the "political thicket" of
reapportionment. The Supreme Court, however,
disagreed with Harlan in a series of rulings during the 1960s. The
first case in this line of rulings was
Baker v. Carr. The Court ruled that the courts had
jurisdiction over
malapportionment issues and therefore were
entitled to review the validity of district boundaries. Harlan,
however, dissented, on the grounds that the plaintiffs failed to
demonstrate that malapportionment violated their individual
rights.
Then, in
Wesberry v.
Sanders, the Supreme
Court, relying on the Constitution's requirement that the
United States House of
Representatives be elected "by the People of the several
States," ruled that
congressional
districts in any particular state must be approximately equal
in population. Harlan vigorously dissented, writing, "I had not
expected to witness the day when the Supreme Court of the United
States would render a decision which casts grave doubt on the
constitutionality of the composition of the House of
Representatives. It is not an exaggeration to say that such is the
effect of today's decision." He proceeded to argue that the Court's
decision was inconsistent with both the history and text of the
Constitution; moreover, he claimed that only Congress, not the
judiciary, had the power to require congressional districts with
equal populations.
Harlan was the sole dissenter in
Reynolds v. Sims, in which the Court relied on the
Equal Protection Clause to
extend the one man, one vote principle to state legislative
districts. He analyzed the language and history of the Fourteenth
Amendment, and concluded that the Equal Protection Clause was never
intended to encompass voting rights. Because the
Fifteenth
Amendment would have been superfluous if the
Fourteenth
Amendment (the basis of the reapportionment decisions) had
conferred a general
right to vote, he
claimed that the Constitution did not require states to adhere to
the
one man, one vote principle, and that the
Court was merely imposing its own political theories on the nation.
He suggested, in addition, that the problem of malapportionment was
one that should be solved by the political process, and not by
litigation. He wrote:
This Court, limited in function in accordance with that
premise, does not serve its high purpose when it exceeds its
authority, even to satisfy justified impatience with the slow
workings of the political process.
For when, in the name of constitutional interpretation,
the Court adds something to the Constitution that was deliberately
excluded from it, the Court, in reality, substitutes its view of
what should be so for the amending process.
For similar reasons, Harlan dissented from
Carrington v.
Rash, in which the Court held that voter qualifications
were subject to scrutiny under the equal protection clause. He
claimed in his dissent, "the Court totally ignores, as it did in
last Term's reapportionment cases [...] all the history of the
Fourteenth Amendment and the course of judicial decisions which
together plainly show that the Equal Protection Clause was not
intended to touch state electoral matters." Similarly, Justice
Harlan disagreed with the Court's ruling in
Harper v.
Virginia Board
of Elections, invalidating the use of the
poll tax as a qualification to vote.
Retirement and death
John M. Harlan's health began to deteriorate towards the end of his
career. His eyesight began to fail during the late 1960s. To cover
this, he would bring materials to within an inch of his eyes, and
have clerks and his wife read to him—and when the Court took an
obscenity case, a chagrined Harlan had his wife read him
Lady Chatterley's Lover. Gravely
ill, he retired from the Supreme Court on September 23, 1971.
Harlan died from
spinal cancer three
months later, on December 29, 1971.
He was buried at the Emmanuel Church
Cemetery in Weston,
Connecticut
. President
Richard
Nixon considered nominating
Mildred
Lillie, a California appeals court judge, to fill the vacant
seat; Lillie would have been the first female nominee to the
Supreme Court. However, Nixon decided against Lillie's nomination
after the
American Bar
Association found Lillie to be unqualified. Thereafter, Nixon
nominated
William Rehnquist (the
future Chief Justice), who was confirmed by the Senate.
Despite his many dissents, Harlan has been described as one of the
most influential Supreme Court justices of the twentieth century.
Harlan's
extensive professional and Supreme Court papers were donated to
Princeton
University
, where they are housed at the Seely G. Mudd
Manuscript Library and open to research. Ethel Harlan, his wife,
outlived him by only a few months and died on June 12, 1972. She
suffered from the
Alzheimer
disease for the last seven years of her life.
See also
Notes
- Dorsen, 2002, pp.
139–143
- Yarbrough,
1992, pp. 10–11
- Leitch 1978,
pp. ?
- Yarbrough,
1992, pp. 13–16
- Yarbrough,
1992, pp. 41–51
- 288 N.Y. 280, 43 N.E.2d 43 (1942)
- Yarbrough,
1992, pp. 52–53
- Tucker, 2002, pp. 6,
51–53
- (fee for article)
- Yarbrough,
1992, pp. 33–35, 41
- (fee for article)
- Dorsen, 2006
- Epstein, 2005
- Dripps, 2005, pp.
125–131
- , Harlan J., dissenting
- , Harlan J., dissenting
- Wildenthal,
2000, p. 1463
- , White, B., dissenting
- , Harlan, J., concurring in the judgment
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- Dripps, 2005, p.
144
- Yarbrough,
1989, Chapter 3, The bill of rights and the states
- Wildenthal,
2000
- Cortner, 1985
- , Harlan, J., concurring
- O'Neil, 2001
- , Harlan, J., concurring in the result in No. 61, and
dissenting in No. 582
- O'Neil, 2001, pp.
63–64
- Abrams, 2005, pp.
15–16
- 216
F.2d 354
- , Mr. Justice Black, with whom Mr. Justice Clark, Mr. Justice
Harlan, and Mr. Justice Stewart join dissenting
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- , Harlan, J., concurring
- Vasicko, 1980
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- Hickok, 1991, pp.
5–7
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- , Harlan, J., dissenting
- Dean, 2001
- For photos of the Harlan's grave see .
- Yarbrough,
1992
References
- (Harlan arranged for Mayer to write this book about his mentor
Emory Buckner and wrote the book's
Introduction.)
Further reading
External links