Robert Houghwout Jackson was the last justice to reach the Supreme Court without a law degree, reading law in the old apprentice fashion in upstate New York. A superb courtroom lawyer, he rose through Franklin Roosevelt's administration as solicitor general and then attorney general, and Roosevelt named him to the Court in 1941. In 1945 he took leave to serve as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership — the crowning act of his career, and a landmark in the birth of international criminal law.
Jackson was the finest writer to sit on the modern Court, and his opinions are quoted more for their prose than almost any other's. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette he wrote the ringing charter of freedom of conscience — 'if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox' — reversing the Court's flag-salute decision of three years before. In his Youngstown concurrence, restraining President Truman's seizure of the steel mills, he set out a three-part framework for judging presidential power that remains the Court's basic guide to the separation of powers. And in Korematsu he dissented, warning that the internment ruling lay 'about like a loaded weapon.' He died in office in 1954.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
1943Holding · The state may not compel schoolchildren to salute the flag; 'no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox' in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.
Role · Jackson wrote for the Court, overruling Gobitis (1940, Frankfurter §78).
One of the greatest free-speech and freedom-of-conscience opinions ever written, and a rare rapid reversal by the Court.
Read the opinion →Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer
1952Holding · (Concurring) The President lacked power to seize the steel mills; presidential authority is 'at its lowest ebb' when he acts against the will of Congress.
Role · Jackson's concurrence set out the famous three-tier framework for presidential power.
The single most influential opinion on the separation of powers, cited in virtually every modern dispute over executive authority.
Read the opinion →Korematsu v. United States
1944Holding · (Dissenting) The Court should not validate the racial internment of citizens; the principle 'lies about like a loaded weapon' ready for reuse.
Role · Jackson dissented from Black's (§76) majority.
A prophetic warning against deferring to claims of military necessity at the expense of constitutional rights.
Read the opinion →Robert Houghwout Jackson is the finest writer ever to sit on the Supreme Court, and one of the most versatile public lawyers in American history. A small-town New York attorney who never attended a full course of law school — the last justice admitted by reading law — he rose through Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to be solicitor general and attorney general, joined the Court in 1941, and then took leave in 1945–46 to serve as the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership. His opinions are landmarks of both doctrine and prose: the ringing flag-salute reversal in West Virginia v. Barnette ('if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation…'), and the Youngstown steel-seizure concurrence, whose three-tier framework of presidential power is the most cited concurrence in constitutional law. Eugene Gerhart's America's Advocate is the standard biography. Start there, read Barnette and Youngstown, and hear Jackson's own voice on Nuremberg.
The Bookshelf
The standard biography, written soon after Jackson's death by a lawyer who admired him. Gerhart covers the whole improbable ascent — the Jamestown, New York, country lawyer who read his way to the bar, the New Deal advocate who became solicitor general and attorney general, the justice, and the Nuremberg prosecutor — with full use of Jackson's papers and speeches. It is admiring and now dated, but it remains the fullest single life, and it conveys the wit and independence that made Jackson unlike anyone else on the Court. (The scholar John Q. Barrett's ongoing work is the modern successor.) Bobbs-Merrill.
The liveliest introduction to Jackson — Noah Feldman's narrative of the Roosevelt Court's four giants, Black, Douglas, Frankfurter, and Jackson, 'scorpions in a bottle' whose brilliance and rivalry made the modern Court. The self-taught country lawyer turned Nuremberg prosecutor is its most vivid figure. Twelve.
The comparative study of Jackson's constitutional thought beside Black's (§76) and Frankfurter's (§78) — three Roosevelt men who agreed about the New Deal and split over rights and executive power. The book for where Jackson stood among his rivals. Rowman & Littlefield.
Jackson's own account of the court-packing crisis, written as Attorney General on the eve of his appointment — a New Dealer's brief against the old Court's war on Roosevelt's program, and a classic of political constitutionalism in its own right. Alfred A. Knopf.
Jackson's valedictory — the Godkin Lectures, published just after his sudden death — a lucid, modest reflection on the Court's real and proper power by the finest writer ever to sit on it. The distilled wisdom of a great judicial career. Harvard University Press.
Jackson's unpublished memoir of Franklin Roosevelt, written in the 1950s and edited a half-century later by the Jackson scholar John Q. Barrett — an intimate, shrewd portrait of the president Jackson served as Attorney General and admired as a friend. Oxford University Press.
Jackson's own account of the case he built against the Nazi leadership, including the opening statement that many regard as the greatest courtroom address of the century — 'the wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.' As chief American prosecutor he shaped the very idea of holding a defeated regime to legal account, and the principles of Nuremberg still frame international criminal law. Read it for the birth of the modern law of war crimes, in the words of its principal architect. Alfred A. Knopf.
The most eloquent defense of freedom of conscience the Court has ever issued, and the reversal of Frankfurter's (§78) Gobitis just three years before. Holding that the state cannot compel Jehovah's Witness children to salute the flag, Jackson wrote that 'if 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.' Handed down on Flag Day in the middle of a world war, it is the high-water mark of the Court's protection of dissent. Free online, and essential reading.
The most influential concurrence in American constitutional law. When the Court blocked Truman's seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War, Jackson set out a three-part framework for judging presidential power — strongest when the president acts with Congress's authorization, weakest when he acts against its will, uncertain in the 'zone of twilight' between. Drawing on his own experience as attorney general, he gave the separation of powers a practical grammar that has governed every executive-power case since, from the Pentagon Papers to the war on terror. Free online, and the first thing to read on presidential power.
Jackson's warning for the ages. Dissenting as the Court upheld the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, he refused to lend the order judicial blessing: a race-based detention once validated by the Court 'lies about like a loaded weapon,' ready for the hand of any authority that can plausibly claim an emergency. The most-quoted warning against judicial deference in a crisis. Free online.
The major Jackson biography at last — published in 2025 by the historian of the Marshall Court and Holmes volumes on these shelves. White gives the whole arc its full weight: the country lawyer who never finished law school, FDR's advocate, the Nuremberg prosecutor, and the author of the finest prose the Court has produced. The book Jackson readers waited seventy years for. Oxford University Press.
A book-length study of the concurrence Jackson drafted for Brown and never filed — wrestling honestly with whether desegregation could be commanded as law rather than politics — before joining Warren's unanimous opinion from a hospital bed. The deepest look inside Jackson's mind at the hardest moment. University Press of Kansas.
The standard insider history of the trial Jackson led, by his successor as chief counsel — unsparing about Jackson's disastrous cross-examination of Göring and generous about the achievement anyway. Until a scholarly monograph centers Jackson at Nuremberg, this is the essential companion to his own Nürnberg Case. Knopf.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Gerhart, America's Advocate — for the country lawyer who became prosecutor of the century
- 2.Barnette — for the 'fixed star' — the Court's finest defense of conscience
- 3.Youngstown concurrence — for the framework that governs presidential power
- 4.The Nürnberg Case — for Nuremberg in Jackson's own incomparable prose
- 5.Feldman, Scorpions — for Jackson among the great rivals of the Roosevelt Court
Where the Papers Are Kept
The Robert H. Jackson papers at the Library of Congress are large and rich — opinions, speeches, the Nuremberg files, and correspondence — and are actively mined by the Robert H. Jackson Center and the scholar John Q. Barrett, whose 'Jackson List' circulates documents from the collection. One of the essential twentieth-century justice archives. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The Youngstown framework. Jackson's three-tier scheme of presidential power has done more to structure separation-of-powers law than any majority opinion of its era. Trace its use from the steel seizure through the Watergate tapes, the Iran-Contra affair, Guantánamo, and the modern travel-ban and immunity cases, and ask why a concurrence — not a holding — became the master text of executive power.
- The prosecutor-justice. Jackson took leave from the Court to run the Nuremberg prosecution, drawing criticism from colleagues (Black §76 among them) that a sitting justice should not serve the executive abroad. Weigh the propriety against the achievement, and set the episode beside the other justices pulled into political service — Roberts §74 at Pearl Harbor, Joseph Lamar §64 at Niagara — as a study in the porous line between Court and government.
- Prose as power. Jackson is quoted more often than almost any justice because he wrote better than almost any justice — Barnette and Youngstown persuade partly by their sentences. Ask what the craft of judicial writing contributes to the authority of law: does memorable prose make a doctrine more durable, and what is gained or lost when opinions are built to be quoted? Seat lineage: Stone §73 (assoc.) → Jackson → Harlan II §89.