Associate Justice of the U.S . Supreme Court
Harlan F. Stone took which position in Feb 1925?
Harlan F . Stone Harlan Fiske Stone ( October 11 , 1872 – April 22 , 1946 ) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S . Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and then as the Chief Justice of the United States from 1941 until his death in 1946 . He also served as the U.S . Attorney General from 1924 to 1925 under President Calvin Coolidge , with whom he had attended Amherst College as a young man . His most famous dictum was : Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern . Born in Chesterfield , New Hampshire , Stone practiced law in New York City after graduating from Columbia Law School . He became the dean of Columbia Law School and a partner with Sullivan & Cromwell . During World War I , he served on the War Department Board of Inquiry , which evaluated the sincerity of conscientious objectors . In 1924 , President Calvin Coolidge appointed Stone as the Attorney General . Stone sought to reform the Department of Justice in the aftermath of several scandals that occurred during the administration of President Warren G . Harding . He also pursued several antitrust cases against large corporations . In 1925 , Coolidge nominated Stone to the Supreme Court to succeed retiring Associate Justice Joseph McKenna , and Stone won Senate confirmation with little opposition . On the Taft Court , Stone joined with Justices Holmes and Brandeis in calling for judicial restraint and deference to the legislative will . On the Hughes Court , Stone and Justices Brandeis and Cardozo formed a liberal bloc called the Three Musketeers that generally voted to uphold the constitutionality of the New Deal . His majority opinions in United States v . Darby Lumber Co . ( 1941 ) and United States v . Carolene Products Co . ( 1938 ) were influential in shaping standards of judicial scrutiny . In 1941 , President Franklin D . Roosevelt nominated Stone to succeed the retiring Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice , and the Senate quickly confirmed Stone . The Stone Court presided over several cases during World War II , and Stones majority opinion in Ex parte Quirin upheld the jurisdiction of a United States military tribunal over the trial of eight German saboteurs . His majority opinion in International Shoe Co . v . Washington ( 1945 ) was influential with regards to personal jurisdiction . Stone was the Chief Justice in Korematsu v . United States ( 1944 ) , ruling the exclusion of Japanese Americans into internment camps as constitutional . Stone served as Chief Justice until his death in 1946 . He had one of the shortest terms of any Chief Justice , and was the first Chief Justice not to have served in elected office . Early years . Harlan Fiske Stone was born in Chesterfield , New Hampshire on October 11 , 1872 , to Fred Lauson Stone and his wife , Ann Sophia ( née Butler ) Stone . He attended Amherst High School , he briefly attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he was expelled in his second year for a scuffle with an instructor . He later enrolled at Amherst College where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1894 . From 1894 to 1895 , he was the sub master of Newburyport High School in Massachusetts , from which he also taught physics and chemistry . From 1895 to 1896 , he was an instructor in history at Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn , New York . Legal career . Stone attended Columbia Law School from 1895 to 1898 , received an LL.B. , and was admitted to the New York bar in 1898 . Stone practiced law in New York City , initially as a member of the firm Satterlee , Canfield & Stone , and later as a partner in what is now a whiteshoe law firm , Sullivan & Cromwell . From 1899 to 1902 he lectured on law at Columbia Law School . He was a professor there from 1902 to 1905 and eventually served as the schools dean from 1910 to 1923 . He lived in The Colosseum , an apartment building near campus . During World War I , Stone served for several months on a War Department Board of Inquiry , with Major Walter Kellogg of the U.S . Army Judge Advocate Corps and Judge Julian Mack , that reviewed the cases of 2,294 men whose requests for conscientious objector status had been denied by their draft boards . The Board was charged with determining the sincerity of each mans principles , but often devoted only a few minutes to interrogation and rendering a decision . Stone was impatient with men who took advantage of the benefits of life in America – using postage stamps was his example – without accepting the burdens of citizenship . In a majority of cases , the Boards subjects either relinquished their claims or were judged insincere . He later summarized his experience with little sympathy : The great mass of our citizens subordinated their individual conscience and their opinions to the good of the common cause while there was a residue whose peculiar beliefs .. . refused to yield to the opinions of others or to force . Nevertheless , he recognized the courage required to persist as a conscientious objector : The Army was not a bed of roses for the conscientious objector ; and the normal man who was not supported in his stand by profound moral conviction might well have chosen active duty at the front as the easier lot . At the end of the war , he criticized Attorney General A . Mitchell Palmer for his attempts to deport aliens based on administrative action without allowing for any judicial review of their cases . During this time Stone also defended free speech claims for professors and socialists . Columbia soon became a center of a new school of jurisprudence , legal realism . Legal realists rejected formalism and static legal rules ; instead , they searched for the experiential and the role of human idiosyncrasy in the development of law . Although Dean Stone encouraged the realists , he was condemned by Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler as an intellectual conservative who had let legal education at Columbia fall into the ruts . In 1923 , disgusted by his conflict with Butler and bored with all the petty details of law school administration that he dubbed administrivia , Stone resigned the deanship and joined the prestigious Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell . He received a much higher salary and headed the firms litigation department , which had a large corporation and estate practice ( including J.P . Morgans interests ) . In full‑time private practice for only a brief time , Stone was considered a hard‑working , solid sort of person , willing on occasion to champion the rights of mankind , but safe nevertheless . Attorney General . On April 1 , 1924 , he was appointed United States Attorney General by his Amherst classmate President Calvin Coolidge , who felt Stone would be perceived by the public as beyond reproach to oversee investigations into various scandals arising under the Harding administration . These scandals had besmirched Hardings Attorney General , Harry M . Daugherty , and forced his resignation . In one of his first acts as Attorney General , Stone fired Daughertys cronies in the Department of Justice and replaced them with men of integrity . As Attorney General , he was responsible for the appointment of J . Edgar Hoover as head of the Department of Justices Bureau of Investigation , which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) , and directed him to remodel the agency so it would resemble Britains Scotland Yard and become far more efficient than any other police organization in the country . A pro‑active Attorney General , Stone argued many of his departments cases in the federal courts and launched an anti‑trust investigation of the Aluminum Company of America , controlled by the family of fellow cabinet member Andrew Mellon , Coolidges Secretary of the Treasury . In the 1924 presidential election , Stone campaigned for Coolidges re‑election . He especially opposed the Progressive Partys candidate , Robert M . La Follette , who had proposed that Congress be empowered to reenact any law that the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional . Stone found this idea threatening to the integrity of the judiciary as well as the separation of powers . Associate Justice . Shortly after the election , Justice Joseph McKenna resigned from the Supreme Court , and on January 5 , 1925 , Coolidge nominated Stone to replace McKenna as an Associate Justice . His nomination was greeted with general approval , although there were rumors that Stone might have been kicked upstairs because of his antitrust activities . Some Senators raised questions about Stones connection to Wall Street making him a tool of corporate interests . To quiet those fears , Stone proposed that he answer questions of the Senate Judiciary Committee in person . Stone was confirmed by the Senate on February 5 by a vote of 71—6 and received his commission the same day . On March 2 , Stone took the oath as Associate Justice administered by Chief Justice William Howard Taft . He would prove to be Coolidges only Supreme Court appointment . The Supreme Court of the mid‑1920s was primarily concerned with the relationships of business and government . A majority of the justices led by Taft were staunch defenders of business and capitalism free from most government regulation . The Court utilized the doctrines of substantive due process and the fundamental right of liberty of contract to oversee attempts at regulation by the national and state governments . Critics of the Court charged that the judiciary had usurped legislative authority and had embodied a particular economic theory , laissez faire , into its decisions . Despite the fears of progressives , Stone quickly joined the Courts liberal faction , frequently dissenting with Justices Holmes and Brandeis and later , Cardozo when he took Holmes seat , from the majoritys narrow view of the police powers of the state . The liberal justices called for judicial restraint , or deference to the legislative will . During the 1932 to 1937 Supreme Court terms , Stone and his colleagues Justices Brandeis and Cardozo were considered the Three Musketeers of the Supreme Court , its liberal faction . The three were highly supportive of President Roosevelts New Deal agenda , which many other Supreme Court Justices opposed . For example , he wrote for the court in United States v . Darby Lumber Co. , , which upheld challenged provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 . Stone also authored the Courts opinion in United States v . Carolene Products Co. , , which , in its famous Footnote 4 , provided a roadmap for judicial review in the post-Lochner v . New York era . Stones support of the New Deal brought him Roosevelts favor , and on June 12 , 1941 , President Roosevelt nominated Stone to become Chief Justice , a position vacated by Charles Evans Hughes . Stone was Hughes’ personal choice for a successor . Stone was confirmed by the Senate on June 27 and received his commission on July 3 . He remained in this position for the rest of his life . Chief Justice . As Chief Justice , Stone spoke for the Court in upholding the Presidents power to try Nazi saboteurs captured on American soil by military tribunals in Ex parte Quirin , . The courts handling of this case has been the subject of scrutiny and controversy . Stone also wrote one of the major opinions in establishing the standard for state courts to have personal jurisdiction over litigants in International Shoe Co . v . Washington , . As Chief Justice , Stone described the Nuremberg court as a fraud on Germans , even though his colleague and successor as Associate Justice , Robert H . Jackson , served as the chief U.S . prosecutor . Stone was the fourth Chief Justice to have previously served as an Associate Justice and the second to have served in both positions consecutively . To date , Justice Stone is the only justice to have occupied all nine seniority positions on the bench , having moved from most junior Associate Justice to most senior Associate Justice and then to Chief Justice . Stone was suddenly stricken while in an open session of the Supreme Court . He had just ( or by some accounts not quite ) finished reading aloud his dissent in Girouard v . United States . Justice Hugo Black called the Court into a brief recess , and physicians were called . Stone died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 22 , 1946 , at his Washington D.C . home . Stone is buried at Rock Creek Cemetery in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington , D.C . His grave is near those of other justices , including Justice Willis Van Devanter , Justice John Marshall Harlan , and Justice Stephen Johnson Field . Other activities . Stone was a director of the Atlanta & Charlotte Air Line Railroad Company , president of the Association of American Law Schools , a member of the American Bar Association , and a member of the Literary Society of Washington for 11 years . Stone was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Amherst College in 1900 , and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Amherst in 1913 . Yale awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in 1924 . Columbia and Williams each awarded him the same honorary degree in 1925 . Amherst would later name Stone Hall in his honor , upon its completion in 1964 . Stone married Agnes E . Harvey in 1899 . Their children were Lauson H . Stone and the mathematician Marshall H . Stone . Columbia Law School awards Harlan Fiske Stone Scholarships to students who demonstrate superior academic performance . Yale Law School awards the Harlan Fiske Stone Prize each fall to winners of the Morris Tyler Moot Court competition .