RUTLEDGE, WILEY BLOUNT, JR.

A stalwart defender of civil liberties, Associate Justice Wiley B. Rutledge Jr., sat on the U.S.

Supreme Court for six years during the transitional new deal era. Rutledge was a distinguished law professor and dean who became a judge through his support of President franklin d. roosevelt. In 1939 Roosevelt named him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and four years later to the Supreme Court. From 1943 until his death in 1949, Rutledge championed the rights of minorities and unpopular groups.

Born in Cloverport, Kentucky, on July 20, 1894, Rutledge was the son of a fundamentalist Baptist minister. His father, Wiley Sr., rode the backwaters of Kentucky preaching hellfire and brimstone, often with his son in tow. By his teens, however, Rutledge had left for the University of Wisconsin where he immersed himself in debate, classical literature, and ancient languages, earning a B.A. in 1914.

In his twenties, tuberculosis and financial trouble forced Rutledge to postpone the legal education he desired. Between 1915 and 1920, he supported himself and his wife, Annabel Person, by teaching high school in Indiana, New Mexico, and finally in Colorado, where he enrolled in a full-time law program at the state university. By 1922 he had earned his law degree, and immediately accepted a job with a Boulder firm. But he left practice two years later in order to embark on a fifteen-year long career as a law professor. He taught at three universities, promoted modern teaching methods, and ultimately served as dean at Washington University (1930–1935) and the Iowa College of Law (1935–1939). It was during these later years, while engaging in debate over local and national issues, that he developed a reputation as a champion of the underdog.

Rutledge was an ardent supporter of President Roosevelt's New Deal, a series of legislative reforms designed to pull the nation out of economic depression. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court struck down one after another of the president's programs. Roosevelt then announced his controversial plan to reorganize the federal judicial system—the so-called court-packing plan that would have filled even the Supreme Court with pro-Roosevelt justices. Rutledge backed it. In 1939 the president appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and in 1943 he appointed Rutledge to the Supreme Court.

Rutledge consistently upheld the rights of the individual, including the rights to a jury trial, to practice religion freely, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and not to suffer cruel and unusual punishment. In his concurring opinion in Schneiderman v. United States, 320 U.S. 118, 63 S. Ct. 1333, 87 L. Ed. 1796 (1943), he voted to restore citizenship to an immigrant who, twelve years after his naturalization, had been targeted for deportation by the justice department because of membership in the Communist Party. In Yamashita v. Styer, 327 U.S. 1, 66 S. Ct. 340, 90 L. Ed. 499 (1946), Rutledge dissented from the denial of habeas corpus relief to Japanese general Yamashita Tomoyuki, who had been sentenced to death for war crimes on the basis of hearsay evidence.

"Precedent is not all controlling in law. There must be room for growth, since every precedent has an origin."
—Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr.

Rutledge regularly joined the opinions of Justices hugo l. black, frank murphy, and william o. douglas. He worked exhaustively, and, in the opinion of some of his brethren on the Court, too much. He died on September 10, 1949, in York, Maine, at the age of 54.

further readings

Friedman, Leon, and Fred L. Israel, eds. 1969. The Justices of the United States Supreme Court, 1789–1969: Their Lives and Major Opinions. New York: Chelsea House.

Rutledge, Wiley Blount, Jr. (b. Cloverport, Ky., 20 July 1894; d. York, Maine, 10 Sep. 1949; interred Green Mountain Cemetery, Boulder, Colo.), associate justice, 1943–1949. Wiley Rutledge, the last of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Court appointments, received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1914 and spent his early years as a high school teacher in Indiana, New Mexico, and Colorado. A law degree from the University of Colorado in 1922 was followed by two years of private practice. For the next fifteen years, he taught law as an associate professor at the University of Colorado and as professor and dean first at Washington University in St. Louis and then at the State University of Iowa.

Rutledge's vocal criticism of anti‐New Deal Supreme Court decisions and his support for FDR's court‐packing plan brought him national attention. In 1939, he was suggested for two Supreme Court vacancies, but the president chose William O. Douglas and Felix Frankfurter and then appointed Rutledge to the prestigious District of Columbia circuit. As an appellate court judge, his opinions consistently reflected New Deal constitutional legal perspectives. When James F. Byrnes retired from the Court in 1942, FDR, in spite of Frankfurter's energetic support of Learned Hand, chose Rutledge.

During his six‐year tenure, Rutledge wrote significant opinions in the areas of administrative law, National Labor Relations Board v. Hearst Publications (1944); civil procedure, Guaranty Trust v. York (1945); labor law, Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway v. Burley (1946) and United States v. United Mine Workers (1947); and tax law, United States v. Massachusetts (1948). Yet his most enduring contribution was his participation in the development of constitutional doctrine in the areas of freedom of speech and religion.

When Rutledge joined the court, it had begun to recognize a constitutional double standard. In United States v. Carolene Products (1938), Justice Stone had suggested that restrictions on First Amendment freedoms would be subject to more exacting judicial scrutiny than government economic regulation (see Footnote Four). Then in his Jones v. Opelika (1942) dissent, joined by Justices black, Douglas, and Frank Murphy, Stone, by then chief justice, explicitly embraced this position. When Rutledge joined the court, he provided the fifth vote for Douglas's opinion in Murdock v. Pennsylvania (1943), which overruled Opelika and struck down on preferred freedom grounds a license fee imposed on the peddlers of religious materials.

Rutledge's contribution to fundamental rights analysis came in Thomas v. Collins (1945). His opinion for the Court provided the clearest exposition of the preferred position doctrine in condemning a state license requirement as a violation of labor organizers' First Amendment rights. In Kovacs v. Cooper (1949), he defended the doctrine against Frankfurter's claim that it was an exercise in mechanical jurisprudence that automatically condemned government regulation. Rutledge knew otherwise. When he joined Black's opinion in Korematsu v. United States (1944) and authored the court's opinion in Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), he had acknowledged that preferred freedoms were not beyond the reach of government when its interests in national security and the general welfare were compelling.

Bibliography

Mr. Justice Rutledge , symposium in Iowa Law Review 35 (Summer 1950): 541–699.

William Crawford Green

William Blount 1749–1800, American political leader, b. near Windsor, N.C. He served in the American Revolution and later became a legislator in North Carolina, a member of the Continental Congress (1782–83, 1786–87), and a delegate to the Federal Constitutional Convention (1787). Washington appointed (1790) him governor of the Territory South of the River Ohio (present-day Tennessee), and there he also had charge (1790–96) of Native American affairs. Blount handled this dual position successfully until financial difficulties forced him into a plan whereby frontiersmen and Native Americans were to help the British conquer Spanish Florida and Louisiana. Before the plan was discovered he presided over the Tennessee constitutional convention (1796) and became one of the state's first U.S. Senators. When the Florida plot was discovered he was expelled (1797) from the Senate. While impeachment proceedings (later dropped) were being instituted, Blount was elected (1798) to the Tennessee senate and was chosen its speaker.

Bibliography: See biography by W. H. Masterson (1954, repr. 1969).