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Abe Fortas
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Abraham Fortas (June 19, 1910–April 5, 1982) was a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice. He served in that role from October 4, 1965 until May 14, 1969, when he resigned under pressure.
as was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He was the youngest of five children. His father, a native of England, was an Orthodox Jew who worked as a cabinetmaker. Abe Fortas acquired a life-long love for music from his father, who encouraged his playing the violin, and was known in Memphis as "Fiddlin' Abe Fortas".
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Abraham Fortas (June 19, 1910–April 5, 1982) was a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice. He served in that role from October 4, 1965 until May 14, 1969, when he resigned under pressure.
Early years
Fortas was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He was the youngest of five children. His father, a native of England, was an Orthodox Jew who worked as a cabinetmaker. Abe Fortas acquired a life-long love for music from his father, who encouraged his playing the violin, and was known in Memphis as "Fiddlin' Abe Fortas". He attended public schools in Memphis, graduating from South Side High School in 1926. He then attended Southwestern at Memphis (now known as Rhodes College), graduating in 1930.
Fortas left Memphis to enroll in Yale Law School. He graduated second in his class in 1933 (second only to another Memphian, Luke Finlay) and was Editor in Chief of the Yale Law Journal. One of his professors, William O. Douglas, was impressed with Fortas and arranged for him to stay at Yale and become an assistant professor.
Shortly thereafter, Douglas left Yale to run the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in Washington, DC. Fortas commuted between New Haven and Washington both teaching at Yale and advising the SEC.
Personal life
In 1935, Fortas married Carolyn E. Agger, who would become a successful tax lawyer. They had no children and after he became a Supreme Court justice, they lived in Georgetown; they also had a summer home in Connecticut.
Fortas was an amateur musician who played the violin in a quartet on Sunday evenings with Isaac Stern.
Early career
He served as general counsel of the Public Works Administration and as Undersecretary of the Interior during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. While he was working at the Department of the Interior, the Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, introduced him to a young congressman from Texas, Lyndon Johnson. In 1945, Fortas was granted a leave of absence from the Department of Interior to join the armed forces. However, according to his official biography, within a month, Fortas was discharged because of an arrested case of eye tuberculosis. Later in 1945, he was appointed by President Harry Truman as an advisor to the U.S. delegation during the organizational meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco and at the 1946 General Assembly meeting in London.
Private practice
After leaving government service, Fortas started the firm Arnold, Fortas & Porter. It became one of Washington's most influential law firms.
In 1948, Lyndon Johnson ran for the Democratic nomination for one of Texas' seats in the US Senate. He won the primary by only 87 votes. His opponent convinced a federal judge to issue an order taking Johnson's name off of the general election ballot while the primary results were being contested; there were serious allegations of corruption in the voting process, including 200 Johnson votes that had been cast in alphabetical order. Johnson asked Fortas for help, and Fortas persuaded U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to overturn the ruling. Johnson became a U.S. senator, winning the general election.
During the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fortas came to widespread notice as the defense attorney for Owen Lattimore. In 1950, Fortas often clashed with Senator Joseph McCarthy when representing Lattimore before the Tydings Committee and later before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.
Durham v. United States
Fortas was known in Washington circles to have a serious interest in psychiatry, still a controversial science at the time. In 1953 this expertise led to his appointment to represent the indigent Monte W. Durham, whose insanity defense had been rejected at trial two years earlier, before the Court of Appeals. Durham’s defense had been denied because the District Court had applied the M’Naghten Rules, requiring that the defense prove the accused didn’t know the difference between right and wrong for an insanity plea to be accepted. Adopted by the British House of Lords in 1843, generations before modern psychiatry, this test was still in near universal use in U.S. jurisprudence over a century later. The effect of this standard was to exclude psychiatric and psychological testimony almost entirely from the legal process. In a critical turning point for U.S. criminal law, the Court of Appeals accepted Fortas’ call to abandon the M’Naghten Rule and allow for testimony and evidence regarding defendants’ mental state.
The Gideon case
In 1962, Fortas represented Clarence Earl Gideon's appeal before the Supreme Court. Gideon, a poor man from Florida, had been convicted of breaking into a pool hall. He could not afford a lawyer, and none was provided for him. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court held for Gideon, ruling that state courts are required under the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution to provide counsel in criminal cases for defendants unable to afford their own attorneys or lawyers.
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson, then President, persuaded Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg to resign his seat to become Ambassador to the United Nations so that he could appoint Fortas, his longtime friend, to the Court. Johnson thought that some of his Great Society reforms could be ruled unconstitutional by the Court, and he felt that Fortas would let him know if that was to happen. Johnson and Fortas did collaborate while Fortas was a justice; Fortas co-wrote Johnson's 1966 State of the Union speech.
On the Court, Fortas was generally a reliable liberal vote, and was particularly concerned with children's rights. Fortas dissented when the Court upheld some public intoxication laws, for example 1968's Powell v. Texas. In 1968, Fortas authored a book titled, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience.
One of Fortas' legal clerks was future under-Secretary of Defense Walter B. Slocombe.
Relationship with other justices
Fortas mostly had good working relations with his fellow justices, although they did worry that he talked to President Johnson too much.
Fortas clashed with fellow Justice Hugo Black during much of his time on the Court. The two had been friends since the 1930s, and Black helped Fortas' wife Agger accept his appointment to the Court. However, once both were on the Court, they disagreed about the fundamental basics of interpreting the Constitution and found themselves on opposing sides in opinions most of the time. In 1968, a Warren clerk called their feud "one of the most basic animosities of the Court."
Fortas' best relationship was with William O. Douglas, and was next-closest to William J. Brennan and Earl Warren. Brennan's offices were in the chambers next to those of Fortas. Fortas' wife recalled that Fortas "loved Warren." Fortas called John Harlan "one of my dearest friends, although we usually are on opposite sides of the issues here."
Approach to oral arguments
Fortas was critical of those justices (he specifically cited Thurgood Marshall) who frequently broke into attorneys' arguments to ask questions. As an attorney arguing before the Court, he had resented justices' intrusions, so as a justice himself he felt it best to let the lawyers give their arguments uninterrupted.
Children's and students' rights
During his time on the Court, Fortas led a revolution in U.S. juvenile justice, broadly extending the Court’s logic on due process rights and procedure to legal minors and overturning the existing paradigm of parens patriae, in which the state had usurped the parental role. Authoring the majority decision in Kent v. United States (1966), the first Supreme Court case that evaluated a juvenile court procedure, Fortas suggested that the existing system might be the “the worst of both worlds.” At that time, the state was held to have a paternal interest in the child rather than a prosecutorial one, a concept that dispensed with the obligation to provide a child accused of a crime with the opportunity to make a defense. Yet the courts were empowered to decide, in the interests of the child, to have the child incarcerated for lengthy periods or otherwise severely punished.
Fortas elaborated on his critique the following year in the case of In re Gault (1967). The case concerned a 15-year-old who had been sentenced to six years (until his majority) in Arizona's State Industrial School for making an obscene phone call to his neighbor. Had he been an adult the maximum punishment he could have received was a $50 fine or two months in jail. Fortas used the case to launch a ferocious attack on the juvenile justice system and parens patriae. His majority opinion was a landmark, extending the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of right to sufficient notice, right to counsel, right to confrontation of witnesses, and right against self-incrimination to certain juvenile proceedings.
Two years later, Fortas authored another landmark in children’s rights with the decision in Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), a case involving two high school students and one junior high school student who had been suspended for wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. Extending First Amendment rights to school students for the first time, Fortas wrote that “neither students nor teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate”.
Epperson v. Arkansas
In 1968, Fortas convinced the court to accept the appeal of Little Rock Central High School teacher Sue Epperson who had challenged Arkansas’ anti-evolution law with the support of the state teachers union. Epperson had won the case, but the Arkansas Supreme Court had overturned the ruling. Although the Court agreed quickly after hearing the case that the Arkansas ruling should be reversed, there was no consensus as to why, with most Justices favoring fairly narrow grounds. Fortas was the architect and author of the broader landmark majority opinion that eventually emerged banning religiously-based creation narratives from public school science curricula.
Presidential power
Fortas believed in an expanded executive branch and a less powerful legislative branch. He wrote: "The enormous growth of presidential power from FDR to Lyndon Johnson was a necessary and an inevitable adaptation of our constitutional system to national needs."
Nomination to be Chief Justice
When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced his retirement in June 1968, Johnson nominated Associate Justice Fortas to replace Warren as Chief Justice. However, the Warren Court's form of jurisprudence had angered many conservative members of the United States Senate, and the nomination of Fortas provided the first opportunity for these senators to register their disenchantment with the direction of the Court; they planned to filibuster Fortas' nomination. Senate Judiciary Committee chair James Eastland told Johnson he "had never seen so much feeling against a man as against Fortas." Fortas was the first Chief Justice nominee ever to appear before the Senate, and he faced hostile questioning about his relationship with Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson had consulted with Fortas about political matters frequently while Fortas was on the Court.
American University payments
Also controversial was Fortas's acceptance of $15,000 for nine speaking engagements at the American University Law School. The money had not come from the university, but from private business interests that altogether represented business interests connected to 40 companies; Senator Strom Thurmond raised the idea that cases involving these companies might come to the Court and Fortas might not be objective. While not illegal, the size of the fee raised much concern about the Court's insulation from private interests, especially as it was funded by Fortas's former clients and partners. The $15,000 represented more than 40% of a Supreme Court justice's salary and was seven times what any other American University seminar leader had ever been paid.
Cloture vote
Upon learning of this problem, President Johnson decided to help Fortas win a majority vote, but only as a face-saving measure, according to Johnson aide Joseph Califano:
The debate on Fortas's nomination had lasted for less than a week, led by Republicans and conservative southern Democrats, or so-called "Dixiecrats". Several senators who opposed Fortas asserted at the time that they were not conducting a perpetual filibuster and were not trying to prevent a final up-or-down vote from occurring. However, the Senate web site now characterizes the debate as the first filibuster on a Supreme Court nominee.
In 1968, Senate rules required two-thirds of senators present to stop a debate (now 60% of the full Senate is needed). The 45 to 43 cloture vote to end the Fortas debate included 10 Republicans and 35 Democrats voting for cloture, and 24 Republicans and 19 Democrats voting against cloture. The 12 other senators, all Democrats, were absent.
The New York Times wrote of the 45 to 43 cloture roll call: "Because of the unusual crosscurrents underlying today's vote, it was difficult to determine whether the pro-Fortas supporters would have been able to muster the same majority in a direct confirmation vote." The next president, Richard Nixon, a Republican, would appoint Warren E. Burger as Chief Justice.
Resignation
Fortas remained on the bench, but in 1969, a new scandal arose. Fortas had accepted a $20,000 retainer from the family foundation of Wall Street financier Louis Wolfson, a friend and former client, in January 1966. Fortas signed a contract with Wolfson's foundation; in return for unspecified advice, it was to pay Fortas $20,000 a year for the rest of Fortas's life (and then pay his widow for the rest of her life). Wolfson was under investigation for securities violations at the time and it is alleged that he expected that his arrangement with Fortas would help him stave off criminal charges or help him secure a presidential pardon; he did ask Fortas to help him secure a pardon from Nixon once he went to prison, which Fortas did not do. Fortas recused himself from Wolfson's case when it came before the Court and had returned the retainer, but not until Wolfson had been indicted twice. Fortas denied that he ever helped Wolfson and there is no evidence that he did. Wolfson was convicted of violating federal securities laws later that year and spent time in prison.
The new Richard Nixon administration became aware of the Wolfson deal when a Life reporter began investigating the story; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover also mentioned a "tax dodge" Fortas had entered into with other judges, and Nixon concluded Fortas should be "off of there." When Chief Justice Earl Warren was informed of the incident by the new Attorney General John N. Mitchell, he persuaded Fortas to resign to protect the reputation of the Court and avoid lengthy impeachment proceedings, which were in their preliminary stages; Fortas' judicial reputation was also affected by the previous Johnson consultation and American University scandals. Justice Hugo Black also urged Fortas to resign, but when Fortas said it would "kill" his wife, Black changed his mind and urged Fortas not to resign. Fortas eventually decided resignation would be best for him and for his wife's legal career, and told his colleagues. William J. Brennan later said, "We were just stunned." Fortas later said he "resigned to save Douglas," another justice who was being investigated for a similar scandal at the same time.
President Nixon eventually appointed as his replacement Harry A. Blackmun, after two previous nominations failed.
Later years
Rebuffed in the wake of his fall by the powerful Washington law firm he had founded, Fortas founded another firm, Fortas and Koven, and maintained a successful law practice until his death in 1982. However, his wife, Carol Agger, stayed at Fortas' original firm, in part due to the fact that Fortas had resigned in order to protect her job there. In the year following his resignation, he turned down an offer to publish his memoirs.
Founding the firm of Fortas & Koven in Washington, DC a year after his resignation, Fortas also kept two non-paying clients: Pablo Casals and Lyndon Johnson, with whom he remained great friends and visited in Texas. Fortas was asked to donate his papers to Johnson's presidential library by Lady Bird Johnson, but he replied that his correspondence with Johnson had always been kept in strictest confidence. According to his law partner Howard Koven, Fortas once consulted with Martin Scorsese on the legality of language Scorsese wanted to use in a movie.
A portrait of him was placed in Yale Law School while he was still alive, underwritten by an anonymous donor. Fortas served as a longtime member of the board of directors of Carnegie Hall, including while he was on the Supreme Court. He also served on the board of the Kennedy Center since it opened in 1964.
The American Bar Association revamped its rules as a result of the Wolfson affair, revising circumstances under which judges should accept outside income.
In the course of his return to private practice, Fortas sometimes appeared before his former colleagues at the Supreme Court. On the first occasion he did so, his successor, Harry Blackmun, recalled that his eyes met Fortas': "[Fortas] kind of nodded... I wondered what was going through his mind." When Blackmun later questioned Fortas if he remembered the encounter, Fortas said he would "never forget it". Blackmun thought Fortas' attitude toward the new justice was remarkable, not showing "an ounce of antagonism or resentment".
Fortas' memorial service was held at the Kennedy Center, with Isaac Stern and Lady Bird Johnson in attendance.
External links
- — Findlaw article by John Dean on the Fortas nomination filibuster.
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