page_title: Harlan F. Stone
section_title: Chief Justice
hierarchical_section_title: Harlan F. Stone / Legal career / Chief Justice
caption_attribution_description: English: Harlan F. Stone 3-cent 1948 issue U.S. stamp.
context_page_description: Harlan Fiske Stone 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.
context_section_description: As Chief Justice, Stone spoke for the Court in upholding the President's power to try Nazi saboteurs captured on American soil by military tribunals in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942). The court's 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, 326 U.S. 310 (1945).
  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.
caption: Harlan F. Stone commemorative stamp, issued in 1948
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