Jackson's Judicial Philosophy: An Exploration in Value Analysis

Abstract

Robert H. Jackson died more than a decade ago, and his departure from the Supreme Court marked the end of an era in American judicial politics, since he left behind as a minority those remaining of the colleagues who had joined with him to compose the so-called Roosevelt Court. He was still very much alive when I interviewed him shortly after the Steel Seizure decision in 1952, and subsequently when the initial stages of the present research were designed and carried out. His unanticipated and fatal heart attack had two incidental consequences that are relevant here: it fixed an unavoidable natural closure for the data—his activities-that I was studying, and at the same time imposed an insurmountable foreclosure upon one of my research ambitions. For the best way to validate generalizations about a man's attitudinal predispositions and belief systems is to check them as predictions against his future behavior; social scientists understandably repose lesser confidence in findings about hypotheses that can be validated only statistically, and then only by retrospective testing. Perhaps it was an error, therefore, not to have switched from Jackson to some other justice as a subject; but even one who chose a younger justice (such as Arthur Goldberg) might have guessed wrongly about his tenure, and Jackson's career did offer several unusual advantages—for reasons that will be explained shortly—which it seemed important to exploit.