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Supreme
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John Marshall Harlan II (1899-1971) |
 John
Marshall (John M.) Harlan was born in Chicago, Illinois on May 20, 1899.
He was the grandson of
John
Marshall Harlan, the post-Reconstruction (1877-1911) Supreme Court
Justice, and the son of John Maynard Harlan, a lawyer and minor Chicago
politician. Harlan spent much of his childhood in Canada, either in
boarding school or at a family vacation home in Quebec. He graduated
from Princeton University in 1920, and then attended Oxford University
as a Rhodes Scholar. Harlan moved to New York City, and spent one year
at New York Law School, during which time he completed two years of
work. He became a member of the New York bar in 1924. After a short time
in private practice, his mentor, Emory Buckner, was appointed United
States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Harlan followed
Buckner to the U.S. Attorney's office. He then returned to the New York
law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner & Howland, where he was a very
successful practitioner throughout the 1930s.
Although Harlan was in his early 40s when the United States entered World War II, he volunteered for military duty and was appointed to an important position with the Army Air Corps (now the Air Force) in England, where he again distinguished himself. Harlan returned to private practice after the war, and in January 1954, Harlan was nominated to the United States Circuit Court for the Second Circuit. He remained on the court for about a year when he was nominated by President Eisenhower to succeed Robert H. Jackson, who had died. As indicated in the title of the book noted below, Harlan is known as the dissenter of the Warren Court. In general, Harlan believed that judges are not the best guarantors of individual liberty. Instead, judges should be restrained in their constitutional decisionmaking, and remain respectful of the ways in which federalism, separation of powers, and the political process generally protect individual freedom. Harlan was a principled man who believed in making decisions based on neutral principles. He was thus opposed to Chief Justice Earl Warren's focus on "what's right." In many respects, Harlan's notion of judicial restraint paralleled that of Felix Frankfurter, with whom he was often unfavorably compared in the past. In 1928, Harlan married Ethel Andrews, and they had a daughter. He died on December 29, 1971. Further reading: Tinsley E. Yarbrough, John Marshall Harlan: Great Dissenter of the Warren Court (1992); Norman Dorsen, John Marshall Harlan and the Warren Court, in The Warren Court in Historical and Political Perspective (Mark Tushnet ed. 1993). |
