Rutledge, Wiley B. (1894–1949)

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RUTLEDGE, WILEY B. (1894–1949)

When Wiley B. Rutledge joined the Supreme Court in January 1943, succeeding james f. byrnes, he helped to forge a liberal coalition that substantially redirected constitutional developments for the next six years. His sudden death in the summer of 1949, two months after the passing of Justice frank murphy, ended a brief era of liberal activism and ushered in the bleakest period for civil liberties in the Court's history. President franklin d. roosevelt's eighth and last appointment to the high bench, Rutledge remained, with the exception of Murphy, the most consistently liberal member of the stone and vinson courts.

When dean of the law school of the University of Iowa, Rutledge's support for FDR's new deal, including the "court-packing" proposal, earned him an appointment to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1939. There he consistently endorsed the social and economic reforms of the Roosevelt administration and also compiled a strong record on civil liberties. In one opinion Rutledge dissented on first amendment grounds when the judges upheld a local license tax levied against itinerant religious preachers.

A year later, as the newest member of the Stone Court, Rutledge provided the fifth and crucial vote in a coalition including hugo l. black, william o. douglas, Murphy, and Chief Justice harlan fiske stone that overturned the Supreme Court's own ruling in a similar case decided six months earlier (Jones v. Opelika, 1943; murdock v. pennsylvania, 1943). He also joined Justice robert h. jackson's opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). (See flag salute cases.)

Rutledge's jurisprudence blended economic nationalism with compassion for the economically disadvantaged and extreme sensitivity to individual rights. He endorsed, for example, interpretation of the wagner act to cover local newspaper carriers and believed that the minimum wage provisions of the fair labor standards act benefited all employees "throughout the farthest reaches of the channels of interstate commerce."

To protect workers from exploitation, Rutledge believed, the federal government could prohibit entirely homework in the embroidery industry. To protect consumers from abuses, the federal government could prosecute insurance companies under the sherman antitrust act, despite more than a half century of precedent to the contrary. (See united states v. south-eastern underwriters association.) He consistently supported the constitutional and statutory rights of working-class Americans, even when the legislative history of the particular law under discussion appeared in doubt (united states v. united mine workers, 1947).

At the same time, Rutledge's concern for individual rights extended even to corporations and capitalists, two groups which often lay beyond the constitutional protection offered by other New Deal liberals on the Court. Unlike Justice felix frankfurter, for example, he did not believe that Congress had intended in the pure food and drug laws to impose criminal liability upon corporate executives without a finding of personal culpability or negligence. Nor did he believe that Congress could punish violators of wartime price regulations without jury trials and without opportunity to contest the regulations' legality in enforcement proceedings. (See yakus v. united states; judicial system.)

Rutledge endorsed without hesitation the concept of preferred freedoms articulated by Justice Stone in united states v. carolene products co. (1938). freedom of speech and press, religious liberty, the right to vote, and judicial protection for "discrete and insular minorities" served as the cornerstones of his philosophy. Like Stone, he, too, failed to implement these ideals in the infamous japanese american cases, but, those apart, his civil liberties record remained impeccable. His most memorable civil liberties opinions came in Thomas v. Collins (1944), where he wrote for a five-man majority that reversed the conviction of a labor organizer who had been convicted of contempt for speaking at a union rally without a permit; in everson v. board of education (1947), where he dissented against an opinion that sustained the constitutionality of state aid to the parents of children in parochical schools for bus transportation; and in re yamashita (1946), where he and Murphy alone dissented against the drumhead trial of a vanquished Japanese general before an American military commission. With eloquence, heat, and sarcasm, Rutledge denounced the proceedings as "the most flagrant … departure … from the whole British American tradition of the common law and the Constitution."

He subscribed as well to Justice Black's notion that the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment "incorporated" the specific protections of the bill of rights, but in the case of adamson v. california (1947), Rutledge and Murphy were also prepared to go far beyond Black's reasoning to hold that "occasions may arise where a proceeding falls so far short of conforming to fundamental standards of procedure as to warrant constitutional condemnation in terms of a lack of due process despite the absence of a specific provision in the Bill of Rights." (See incorporation doctrine.)

Had Rutledge and Murphy lived, the course of constitutional development in the McCarthy era of the early 1950s might have been healthier for both the Court and the country.

Michael E. Parrish
(1986)