Source: https://w1.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1329/abe-fortas
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 18:54:31+00:00

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Abe Fortas (1910–1982) served on the Supreme Court from 1965 to 1969, when he resigned in the midst of controversy. During his time on the Court, he authored several important First Amendment opinions.
Fortas, who was born in Memphis, Tennessee, graduated from Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) and Yale Law School, where he edited the law journal. During the New Deal Era, he served in various executive branch positions. Meanwhile, he became friends with a young congressman from Texas named Lyndon B. Johnson.
In 1946 Fortas joined with two other well-known New Deal figures, Thurman Arnold and Paul Porter, to establish what would become one of Washington’s most prestigious corporate law firms: Arnold, Fortas, and Porter.
Although the firm gained most of its revenue from representing large corporations, Fortas also won acclaim for championing civil liberties and the rights of the individual. Indeed, in 1962, prior to his appointment to the Supreme Court, Fortas was chosen by the Court to represent Clarence Earl Gideon, an indigent Florida prisoner who had been convicted without the benefit of counsel. In what became the landmark case of Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court ruled that states had to provide counsel for indigents accused of felonies.
In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson nominated Fortas to the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, who resigned to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. The Senate confirmed Fortas’s appointment on August 11, 1965. After a short but distinguished tenure, Fortas resigned from the Court on May 14, 1969, under a cloud of controversy that had actually begun to form the previous year. In 1968 President Johnson had nominated Fortas to replace Chief Justice Earl Warren, but senators concerned about Fortas’s financial dealings blocked his confirmation with a filibuster, and later he withdrew his nomination.
Justice Fortas’s most famous and influential First Amendment decision was Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969).
The Court likened the case to, among others, the substantive due process case of Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which found a ban on teaching a foreign language unconstitutional, and West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which held that students could not be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Court concluded that to be punishable, behavior directly implicating First Amendment rights, such as wearing armbands, must foster disorder or disturbance in the school. Because “only a few of the 18,000 students in the school system wore the black armbands” and there was no evidence that classes were actually disrupted, the school could not meet the high standard justifying punishment of the students.
In Street v. New York (1969), involving desecration of the U.S. flag, Fortas joined Chief Justice Earl Warren’s dissent. The majority had focused on the man’s speech — not his treatment of the flag itself. The dissenters reasoned that bans on flag burning should, by and large, be constitutional.
Similarly, Fortas dissented from the majority opinion on libel in Time, Inc. v. Hill (1967), in which the Court extended the actual malice test for libel from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) to include false light invasion of privacy cases. Fortas disagreed that actual malice should be the standard for these cases. Instead, he thought negligence was the appropriate standard for liablity in these types of cases.
"Fortas, Abe." Federal Judicial Center.
Kalman, Laura. Abe Fortas: A Biography. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.
Murphy, Bruce Allen. Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice. New York: William Morrow, 1998.
Hindley, Meredith. "Supremely Contentious: The Transformation of 'Advice and Consent'." HUMANITIES, September/October 2009, Vol. 30, No. 5.
Greenhouse, Linda. "Ex-Justice Abe Fortas Dies at 71; Shaped Historic Rulings on Rights." The New York Times, April 7, 1982.
Smentkowski, Brian P. "Abe Fortas: United States jurist." Encyclopedia Britannica, updated Jan. 25, 2007.

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