Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment

By G. Edward White

Book Overview

Discover the meteoric rise of one of the most extraordinary and singular figures in American jurisprudence, Robert H. Jackson, from self-trained lawyer to influential Supreme Court Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in this compelling new biography. Until he joined the U.S. government in 1934, Robert H. Jackson had been a lawyer in private practice in Upstate New York who was admitted to the bar without going to college and after completing only one year of law school. Once part of FDR's administration, Jackson became, in rapid succession, United States Solicitor General and United States Attorney General, where he successfully defended New Deal programs before the Supreme Court, including the legality of Lend Lease, which helped the U.S. give war supplies to England in exchange for grants of territory and harbors. Jackson played a central role in formulating the arguments justifying a number of initiatives on constitutional grounds and in drafting the policy statements that accompanied them. In 1941, FDR nominated him to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, on which he served until his death in 1954, only months after his adding his vote to the unanimous decision in Brown V. Board of Education. It was a meteoric rise for someone from outside the elite, and essentially self-trained. That didn't stop Jackson from becoming one of the most influential and independent-minded judges of his day, unafraid to question the status quo and leave his mark on a number of landmark cases, including West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett, which guaranteed First Amendment rights by holding that students in public schools did not have to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He dissented from the notorious decision in Korematsu v. U.S., which condoned the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. To many, however, Jackson's most significant contribution was as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials following the war. Drawing on Jackson's extensive personal papers in the Library of Congress and the Jackson Center, as well as a substantial oral history, G. Edward White's biography offers the first full-length portrait in decades of this fascinating and seminal figure.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0197778437
• ISBN13: 9780197778432
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The Best Resource for the Law-Privy on one of the most Enigmatic Supreme Court Justices

After recently developing an interest in Justice Jackson after watching the movie Nuremberg, I was enticed to read this book as there are few books dedicated to Jackson. It’s a fantastic resource for those with a strong interest in the law and a great desire to know many of the intimate details on Justice Jackson. The author went to great lengths to give the reader so many details most people probably don’t care about, like letters he wrote to his children while they were in college, his family’s ancestry, and many of the legal precedents that led up to Jackson’s decisions while on the court. A lay person such as yours truly may not have that great an interest in layers of legal proceedings and court decisions long before Jackson’s time, but they are engaging in their own right. Feel free to skim parts of a book that bore you, I say. Some of the writing is incredibly verbose and could’ve used a better editing job, but it’s still a great read. The chapters on Jackson’s time at Nuremberg were by far the best. This was a man with a clear sense of purpose and morals that wanted more than justice after the holocaust—he wanted to show why rule of law was so important in its aftermath, and how we could stop it from ever happening again. You’ll get great insight into the man personally as well as the incredible body of work he left behind at Nuremberg…and on the Court, but let’s admit it, history will remember him best for his work at Nuremberg. He did foresee a lot of the partisan rancor the US courts would start to embrace, and he was a man of incredible objectivity in a job that was (and is) notorious for pushing an agenda over the rule of law. A great read for anyone interested in the life and work of one of the strangest, yet brilliant, minds to have graced American law.