Potter Stewart

Supreme court justice Potter Stewart was born on January 23, 1915 and died on December 7, 1985. He served 22 years, 8 months, and 19 days as a supreme court judge. Stewart was a republican and was nominated a president Eisenhower. Stewart was the son of the Republican mayor of Cincinnati, so he was raised on politics. Though his background was ideologically conservative, Stewart was often cast as a centrist on the Court. Often he would vote with liberal justices on First Amendment issues and then side with conservative justices on matters of equal protection.

Stewart was born in Jackson, Michigan while his family was on vacation. His father, James G. Stewart, was a prominent Republican from Cincinnati Ohio. His father served as Mayor of Cincinnati for seven years and was later a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court.

Stewart attended the Hotchkiss school, graduating in 1933. Then, he went on to yale university, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon and Skull and Bones graduating class of 1937. Here he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as chairman of the student newspaper, The Yale Daily News. He graduated from Yale law school in 1941, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

He served in World War 2 as a member of the US Navy Reserve aboard oil tankers.

In 1943, he married Mary Ann Bertles in a ceremony at Bruton Episcopal Church in Williamsburg Virginia. They eventually had a daughter, Harriet, and two sons, Potter, Jr. and David.

In 1954 President Eisenhower appointed Stewart to the federal bench. Stewart's high profile in the Ohio bar made him an attractive candidate for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he served for the next four years. He was widely respected for his competence and efficiency as an appellate judge, and Eisenhower returned to him in 1958 when a seat opened on the Supreme Court. Although southern senators who disliked his embrace of school desegregation offered scattered opposition to his appointment, the nomination easily succeeded.

On the Supreme Court, Stewart was a moderate justice. He was criticized for indecision, chiefly because he was often the unpredictable swing vote in cases that pitted the Warren Court's activist and judicial restraint blocs against each other. Stewart, however, followed his instincts on the Court without obvious resort to ideology or doctrine. To the question of whether he was liberal or conservative, he replied, "I am a lawyer," explaining that the labels had little value for him in the political sphere and even less in law. Stewart's approach in his opinions is notable for its plain-edged pragmatism.

In the arena of civil rights and liberties, Stewart's moderate outlook clearly revealed itself. He sided with claimants in 52 percent of these cases. Among his most notable decisions in favor of civil liberties was Jones v. Alfred H Mayer CO, in which the Warren Court upheld measures that protected African Americans against discrimination in housing. Stewart's pragmatism did not allow for subjectivity, however. Although he regarded Connecticut's ban on the use of contraceptives as silly, he found the law constitutional and dissented from the majority in Griswold v. Connecticut. He maintained his moderate outlook in his later years on the Court. He agreed with the majority's expansion of a right to privacy in the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade, but he also attacked the Court's tendency to invalidate any state law it found unwise.

Potter Stewart will be remembered for two cases. The first was a pornography case, Jacobellis v. Ohio. The U.S supreme court decision handed down in 1964 involving whether the state of Ohio could consistent with the first amendment, ban the showing of a French film called "The Lovers" which the state had deemed obscene.