Fortas Resignation

Fortas Resignation On 5 May 1969, Life magazine revealed that in 1966, Justice Abe Fortas had accepted a twenty‐thousand‐dollar honorarium for becoming a consultant to a charitable foundation headed by his former client, Louis Wolfson, which he had returned after Wolfson was twice indicted. The article suggested that Fortas might have given Wolfson legal advice and noted that Wolfson had dropped Fortas's name “in strategic places.”

In the dramatic days that followed, Fortas issued an obfuscatory statement that satisfied no one. The media hounded him. Liberals deserted him. The Nixon administration, which wanted Fortas's seat for a conservative, worked to force him off the bench. Soon after Fortas resigned on 14 May, the public learned that while he had indeed returned the money mentioned in the Life article, the foundation had initially agreed to pay Fortas twenty thousand dollars annually for life and the same amount annually to his wife should she survive him.

Justices commonly supplemented their salaries by accepting honoraria for serving on foundation boards, and Fortas did not give Wolfson legal advice or seek preferential treatment for him. But Fortas's relationship with Wolfson seemed suspect, and the American Bar Association declared it contrary to the provision in the canon of judicial ethics that a judge's conduct must be free of the appearance of impropriety. Fortas's actions led the association to revise its canon of judicial ethics in an attempt to deter judges from accepting income for outside activities by requiring that they report it publicly.

See also Resignation and Retirement.

Laura Kalman