Robert H. Jackson

Abstract A portrait of the life and career of Robert H. Jackson, Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1941 to 1954 and Chief Prosecutor for the American delegation to the Nuremberg Trials of 1945 and 1946. The work centers on three dimensions of Jackson’s life and career. The first is his evolution from private law practice in the small western New York city of Jamestown to become a major figure in the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential administrations, serving as Solicitor General and Attorney General of the United States, and culminating in his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1941. The second is the interval between Jackson’s appointment and his death in 1954, where he spent his time as an Associate Justice and as the chief architect and U.S. prosecutor of Nazi officials charged with war crimes at Nuremberg. In that time interval Jackson was not only involved with developments at Nuremberg but with several important decisions of the Court, including free speech and national security cases, the appeal of Jullius and Ethel Rosenberg from their conviction for espionage in revealing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, and the decision in Brwon v. Board of Education to invalidate racial segregation in the public schools. The third dimension consists of overall assessments of Jackson as a writer, as a lawyer and judge, and as a personality.