and legal history, including the three-volume Law in American History and Oliver Wendell Holmes: Sage of the Supreme Court.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment, with the following results:
Page 99 in Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment comes at the end of a chapter summarizing Robert Jackson’s service as Solicitor General and Attorney General in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It indicates that Jackson, who had been with the federal government in various capacities since 1934, had become dissatisfied with his role as Attorney General because he felt that by the spring of 1941 the U.S. economy was moving to a war footing and New Deal domestic programs, which Jackson had sought to implement, were coming to an end. The last paragraph of page 99 states that just at the time Jackson was experiencing that discontent, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes of the Supreme Court announced his retirement and Jackson became a likely candidate to be appointed to the Court, very possibly as Chief Justice.Learn more about Robert H. Jackson at the Oxford University Press website.
As such readers of the book would get a good idea of its whole from page 99. The page identifies a forthcoming transition in Jackson’s career, from private law practice in Jamestown, New York from 1912 to 1934 and government official in Washington for the next seven years to the role that would occupy him for most of the rest of his career, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The remainder of the book covers Jackson on the Court, where he served from 1941 until his death from a heart attack in October, 1954, and Jackson as Chief Prosecutor for the U.S. delegation at the Nuremberg trials, where several leading Nazis were accused of war crimes. Jackson not only prosecuted some of the Nazi leaders, most conspicuously Hermann Goering, but was the architect of the Nuremberg tribunal’s form and substance. Page 99 shows Jackson poised to make the major contributions of his professional career.
Robert Jackson, who never went to college and attended law school for only one year, is one of the unique figures in American legal history. He was the author of a concurring opinion in the steel-strike case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer that sketched a framework for the scope and limits of executive power under the Constitution. His opinion was relied upon in two of the Supreme Court’s most pivotal opinions, Nixon v. United States (1974), rejecting President’s Nixon effort to invoke executive privilege to prevent revelation of White House tapes, and Trump v. United States (2024), setting forth the immunity of the President from criminal prosecution for “official” acts during his tenure. Robert Jackson has not had a biography in sixty-seven years. It is time to reintroduce him to the reading public.
--Marshal Zeringue
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