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Robert H. Jackson: Head of State?

Robert H. Jackson would have made an interesting President. Some might disagree principally because of his disposition to work alone on many matters but F.D.R. himself had a secretive side to him, and it did not hinder his effectiveness. Jackson would have been a strong head of state because his affable personality would have made him the type of leader that subordinates would have been eager to emulate and because he was a thoroughly practical man. He would have understood all the nuances of the problems he faced and the solutions that would or would not have worked to solve them.

Brown v. Board of Education II Law Clerks Roundtable

Here is the transcript of the May 18, 2005 roundtable discussion at the Jackson Center of Supreme Court law clerks Gordon B. Davidson, Daniel J. Meador, Earl E. Pollock, and E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., who served on the Court at the time of the Brown II decision in 1955, moderated and introduced by John Q. Barrett. Although Robert H. Jackson died before the Brown II decision, his last law clerk, E. Barrett Prettyman continued to clerk for John Marshall Harlan, who succeeded Jackson on the Court. With the phrase "with all deliberate speed," Brown II dictated how the unanimous anti-segregation Brown I decision from the year before was to be implemented. Brown I was the last case that Robert H. Jackson was involved in before his death on October 9, 1954.

Brown v. Board of Education Law Clerks Roundtable

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States decided in Brown v. Board of Education that state and federal laws segregating public school children by race were unconstitutional. In Brown, which actually is the name of just one of the five lower court decisions on school segregation that the Supreme Court reviewed 50 years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a Supreme Court that was unanimous. The Court in Brown explicitly rejected its own almost 60-year-old precedent approving "separate but equal" public institutions and facilities for persons of differing races. Brown is generally regarded as among the most, if not as itself the most, significant Supreme Court decision in United States history.
On April 28, 2004, the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, New York, assembled, for a group discussion, four former Supreme Court law clerks: John David Fassett, Earl E. Pollock, E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr. and Frank E.A. Sander.

Robert H. Jackson: A Perspective Twenty-Five Years Later

Playing it Dangerous: Justice Jackson’s Passionate Style

A Jackson Portrait for Jamestown

Albany in the Life Trajectory of Robert H. Jackson

The Nuremberg Roles of Justice Robert H. Jackson

It is an honor to be at this conference, and especially on this panel, with heroes. “Heroes” is not too strong a word. My friends Whitney Harris, Henry King and Benjamin Ferencz, who are present here, and other senior Nuremberg prosecutors such as Justice Benjamin Kaplan and Professor Bernard Meltzer who are not at this conference, are among my own heroes, but that is a personal point. Their general, permanent significance includes the fact that they are heroes of the law for what they did sixty years ago and have done ever since to develop the law and legacy of Nuremberg.

Reflections on Jackson and Barnette

For Me, Robert H. Jackson is Alive

As one without a law degree and with no credentials as a historian, it is a great honor for me to pay a layman's tribute to the most eminent alumnus of the Albany Law School: Robert H. Jackson. He is justly famous as one of the most eloquent Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, but perhaps no judicial comments have ever equaled his opening and closing statements at the Nuremberg trials. His determination to make those trials reflect our highest principles of justice and morality is incomparable. Robert Jackson has been gone for fifty years, but his legacy lives on. With new and different war crimes trials on the front pages of every newspaper, Jacksonís legacy takes on ever more powerful meaning.