Harlan, John Marshall

born June 1, 1833, Boyle county, Ky., U.S.

died Oct. 14, 1911, Washington, D.C.

U.S. jurist.

In the 1850s he was a lawyer and county judge in Boyle county, Ky. From 1861 to 1863 he commanded a Union regiment in the American Civil War. He served as state attorney general (1863–67) and ran unsuccessfully as a Republican candidate for governor in 1871 and 1875. In 1877 he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes. During his tenure, which lasted to his death in 1911, he became one of the most forceful dissenters in the court's history and its outstanding liberal justice. His best-known dissenting opinions, such as those in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the Civil Rights cases (1883), favoured the rights of blacks. He also issued famous dissents in favour of the federal income tax (1895) and opposing monopolies in cases arising under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. His grandson John Marshall Harlan (1899–1971) also served on the Supreme Court (1955–71).

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▪ United States jurist [1833-1911]

born June 1, 1833, Boyle County, Ky., U.S.

died Oct. 14, 1911, Washington, D.C.

 associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1877 until his death and one of the most forceful dissenters in the history of that tribunal. His best known dissents favoured the rights of blacks as guaranteed, in his view, by the post-Civil War constitutional amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth). In the 20th century the Supreme Court vindicated his positions on civil rights and on many other issues in which he was in dissent at the time.

      In the 1850s Harlan, a lawyer and county judge in Kentucky, was active in the Know-Nothing Party. From 1861 to 1863 he commanded a Union infantry regiment in the American Civil War. In 1863 and again in 1865 he was elected attorney general of Kentucky. Critical of the Emancipation Proclamation and other wartime emergency measures taken by President Abraham Lincoln, Harlan opposed Lincoln's reelection in 1864 and supported the unsuccessful Democratic Party candidate, General George B. McClellan. After the war he attacked the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery, although as Kentucky attorney general he showed moderation toward the freed blacks. Later in the decade he was appalled by white-racist violence and espoused the Radical Republicans' policy for reconstructing the South. As a Republican he was defeated for governor of Kentucky in 1871 and 1875.

      On Nov. 29, 1877, Harlan was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Rutherford B. Hayes. He wrote 1,161 opinions (including 316 dissents) in nearly 34 years and was the Court's outstanding liberal justice during that time. He issued a famous dissent in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co. (1895), in which the Court ruled the federal income tax to be unconstitutional, and in various cases arising under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, he insisted that Congress had intended to destroy monopolies entirely, not merely to keep them under control.

      Harlan dissented from the Supreme Court's ruling in the Civil Rights cases (1883) that Congress could not punish discrimination against blacks by private persons but only by those acting in an “official” or “state” capacity. In his dissents in the Insular cases involving overseas territories recently annexed by the United States, he opposed the withholding of the Bill of Rights from those unincorporated territories.

      Perhaps the most famous of Harlan's dissents was that in Plessy (Plessy v. Ferguson) v. Ferguson (1896), the case in which the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” principle of racial segregation. Asserting that “our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” he expressed the justified fear that the majority of the court was consigning black citizens of the United States to a permanent “condition of legal inferiority.” From 1954, when the school segregation cases (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and Bolling v. Sharpe) were decided, the court repudiated the “separate but equal” doctrine and other theories of racial discrimination.

▪ United States jurist [1899-1971]

born May 20, 1899, Chicago

died Dec. 29, 1971, Washington, D.C.

      U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1955 to 1971.

      He was the grandson of John Marshall Harlan, who sat on the Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911. The younger John Marshall graduated from Princeton University in 1920, took his master's degree from the University of Oxford in 1923, and received his law degree from the New York Law School in 1924, being admitted to the bar the following year. He then practiced law and held several public posts, served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and resumed his prestigious law practice after the war. In 1954 he was appointed judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a few months later Eisenhower appointed him to the Supreme Court.

      Harlan proved to be a conscientious and firmly independent member of the Court who was noted for his lucid, closely reasoned opinions. He believed in maintaining a strict dividing line between federal and state authority and opposed the tendency of the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren to intrude into what Harlan considered matters not under its strictly constitutional purview. This stance earned him the reputation of a conservative, despite the moderate cast of some of his opinions.

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