The 2023 Harlan Fiske Stone Society Reception

Born on a farm in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, on October 11, Stone grows up in Amherst, Massachusetts. (Stone’s family on his father’s side originally arrived from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635.) 

Graduates from Amherst College, where he plays on the football team and becomes acquainted with fellow student and future President Calvin Coolidge, who will later nominate Stone to the Supreme Court. His classmates predict Stone will “proceed to be the most famous man in [the class of] ’94.”

Graduates from Columbia Law School, joins the New York City firm of Wilmer and Canfield (later Satterlee, Canfield, & Stone), and, in 1899, begins teaching at Columbia Law as a lecturer in law. In 1905, he resigns from the faculty to devote himself full-time to private practice.

Returns to Columbia Law School as dean and resumes teaching. An inspiring educator who champions the increasingly popular “case” method, he teaches courses in trusts, contracts, mortgages, criminal law, and property. Students regard him as a friend and honor him by calling themselves “Stone-agers.” After repeatedly clashing with Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler, Stone resigns in 1923 and joins the Wall Street firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Pushes back against Barnard College Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, who lobbies for women to be admitted to the Law School. In a letter to Gildersleeve, he tells her the faculty believes it is “inadvisable” for any law school to be coeducational. “What I would like to see is a serious undertaking to establish an independent school for women. This, I believe, is the proper solution of the problem,” he wrote her. (The Columbia Law faculty votes to admit women on the same terms as men in 1928.)

Appointed by President Calvin Coolidge as U.S. attorney general. His most enduring legacy as attorney general is selecting 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover as acting director of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation. Hoover, who becomes its director by the end of the year, leads the agency (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935) until his death in 1972.

Nominated to the Supreme Court, where former President William Howard Taft is chief justice, Stone is the first nominee to have a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On the high court, he soon aligns himself with the titanic left-of-center justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Delivers an eloquent and important dissent in United States v. Butler outlining two principles for declaring statutes unconstitutional. “One is that courts are concerned only with the power to enact statutes, not their wisdom,” he writes. “The other is that while unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check up our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint.”

In Stone’s opinion in United States v. Carolene Products Co., his footnote No. 4 becomes what is universally recognized as “the most important footnote in constitutional law.” He writes that legislation should be “subjected to more exacting judicial scrutiny” when it is “directed at particular religious, or national, or racial minorities” who are victims of “prejudice,” which spawns the principle of judicial review known as strict scrutiny. 

Stone is the lone dissenter in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, maintaining that a group of Jehovah’s Witness children have the right to not salute the flag—in defiance of a Pennsylvania flag salute statute—because they believe the action to be against their religious beliefs. (They consider the flag a graven image.) Stone maintains that the Pennsylvania statute violates the students’ rights to freedom of speech and religion, and he reads his entire dissent from the bench.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who attended the Law School from 1905 to 1907) appoints Stone to succeed Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes Sr. 1884. The poet Archibald MacLeish writes that Stone’s elevation, on July 3, to chief justice is “so clearly and certainly and surely right, it resounded in the world like the perfect word spoken at the perfect moment.” Prior to his appointment, Stone writes the majority opinion in United States v. Darby Lumber Co., holding the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to be a valid exercise of federal power under the commerce clause. The Darby opinion made Stone “the intellectual leader of the Court’s center,” according to Stone biographer Alpheus T. Mason.

The Supreme Court hears another flag salute case from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette. By a 6–3 vote, the justices side with Stone and overturn Gobitis. Justice Robert Jackson’s majority opinion echoes Stone’s lone dissent in Gobitis three years earlier.

Stone passes away on April 22 at 73, a few hours after having a cerebral hemorrhage while presiding over a session of the Supreme Court. Some 2,000 people attend his funeral at the Washington Cathedral, and he is buried at Rock Creek Cemetery. One of his eulogists is Alben Barkley, a senator from Kentucky and future vice president, who says, “No associate justice or chief justice . . . held a more abiding place in the affections of the American people and in the affections of all who knew him intimately and personally.” The Columbia Law Review memorializes him in September with the article “Harlan Fiske Stone: Teacher, Scholar and Dean.” 

Read more:

“Nation Pays Honor at Stone’s Funeral” The New York Times

“Chief Justice Harlan Stone of the Supreme Court Is Dead” The New York Times

“Harlan Fiske Stone, Supreme Court Collection” CQ Press

“Harlan Fiske Stone: Teacher, Scholar and Dean” Columbia Law Review