(b. Memphis, Tenn., 19 June 1910; d. Washington, D.C., 5 Apr. 1982; cremated), associate justice, 1965–1969. The son of immigrant Jews, Fortas won scholarships to Southwestern College and Yale Law School. Arriving in New Haven during the heyday of legal realism, Fortas learned to treat law as a tool of social policy and became the protégé of Thurman Arnold and William O. Douglas. Fortas served as editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal and stood second in his class when he graduated in 1933.

Fortas became a New Dealer and joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. In 1935, he married Carolyn Agger, and the couple moved to New Haven so she could attend Yale Law School. Fortas taught there and commuted to Washington to work with Douglas at the Securities and Exchange Commission until she graduated. In 1939, Fortas joined the Department of Interior and made himself indispensable to the department's irascible secretary, Harold Ickes. As under secretary during World War II, Fortas supported land reform, opposed the imposition of martial law in Hawaii and fought the internment of Japanese‐Americans. Critics questioned his tactics, but few doubted his efficacy.

With other New Dealers, Fortas realized his expertise in interpreting governmental regulations could prove lucrative at war's end. Fortas established a law firm in Washington with Thurman Arnold and Paul Porter and began representing the corporate interests New Dealers had once attacked. Yet few lawyers more vigilantly protected civil liberties during the postwar Red Scare than Fortas, who defended Owen Lattimore and other victims of McCarthyism. Later, he successfully argued two landmark pro bono cases: Durham v. United States (1954), which updated the legal definition of insanity; and Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which established a right to counsel in all state felony cases. A brilliant legal strategist, Fortas was a great courtroom advocate and was considered a “lawyer's lawyer.” As managing partner of Arnold, Fortas & Porter, Fortas was disliked by many associates who found him cold, but he built it into one of Washington's most successful firms and was earning nearly $175,000 annually by 1964.

By that time he had become one of President Lyndon B. Johnson's most trusted advisers. The loud, crude politician and the quiet lawyer who loved chamber music seemed an odd couple, but Fortas had successfully defended Johnson in his disputed 1948 primary election for senator and proved his loyalty repeatedly afterwards. To reward his friend, Johnson engineered Arthur Goldberg's departure from the Court in 1965 and offered Fortas the vacancy. Fortas initially demurred. Both he and Agger, who had joined his firm, feared the salary cut; and the firm needed him. But Fortas wanted the job, and Johnson insisted he take it.

As a justice, Fortas shared the Warren Court majority's commitment to expanding civil liberties and civil rights. His two most important opinions involved children: In re Gault (1967) extended to juvenile offenders many due process protections previously reserved for adults; and in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), Fortas insisted on students' right to engage in nondisruptive protest and to express their opposition to the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to school. With his support, the Court issued Miranda v. Arizona (1966), upheld the Voting Rights Act of 1965, invalidated the poll tax, and insisted on legislative reapportionment. He sided with the Court's majority against big business and wrote one of the Warren Court's most radical antitrust opinions, U.S. v. Arnold, Schwinn and Company (1967). Unlike the majority, however, Fortas despised the press and sought unsuccessfully to subordinate First Amendment freedoms to the right to privacy in his dissent in Time, Inc. v. Hill (1967). Fortas was capable of writing well‐crafted opinions, such as Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), in which he struck down a state statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution. More frequently, however, his opinions reflected a concern for social policy over legal precedent. His tendency to interpret the Due Process Clause as a broad guarantee of fairness enraged Hugo Black, but most of his brethren applauded his activism.

Like Black, however, they were dismayed by Fortas's continuing closeness to Johnson. Because he was restless in the cloistered environs of the Court and could not resist Johnson's entreaties, Fortas became involved in the divisive issues that destroyed his friend's presidency. He strongly advocated American intervention in Vietnam and advised Johnson to send troops into riot‐torn Detroit (See Extrajudicial Activities).

When Chief Justice Earl Warren resigned in 1968, Johnson nominated Fortas for the position. Senators used Fortas's confirmation hearings as a forum for claiming that the Warren Court's protection of individual rights had aided criminals and damaged the state. Though Fortas downplayed his relationship with Johnson and noted that justices had long counseled presidents, opponents also charged that Fortas had violated the principle of “separation of powers.” Johnson, who had announced he would not seek reelection, could do little for Fortas. The nomination was already doomed when senators learned that Fortas, who was dissatisfied with his salary, had accepted fifteen thousand dollars raised by Paul Porter from the justice's friends and former clients for teaching a summer course at American University, an arrangement many considered improper. Republicans and conservative southern Democrats launched a filibuster, and the nomination was withdrawn at Fortas's request.

A year later Fortas's financial dealings came under renewed scrutiny when Life magazine revealed that he had accepted an honorarium for serving on a charitable foundation headed by a former client. Fortas resigned from the Court in disgrace (See Fortas Resignation). When his old firm refused to take him back, he opened a small firm, where he again established a flourishing practice combining corporate law with pro bono work. He did not have the time or temperament to become a great justice, but he was a great lawyer.

Bibliography

• Laura Kalman, Abe Fortas (1990).
• Bruce Murphy, Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice (1988)

— Laura Kalman

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A noted civil libertarian, Abe Fortas (1910-1982) served only four years on the Supreme Court before a series of charges led to his resignation.

Abe Fortas, who was nominated by his friend President Lyndon B. Johnson to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1965, was born on June 19, 1910, in Memphis, Tennessee. His parents were Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from England. At the age of 15 he was graduated second in his class from a Memphis public high school and earned a scholarship to Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in his hometown.

He received his B.A. in 1930 and, based on his stellar performance as an undergraduate, both Harvard and Yale Law Schools offered him scholarships. (A $50 difference per month in the Yale stipend resulted in Fortas' choice of New Haven over Cambridge.) The future justice's consistency as a scholar continued in law school. By his senior year he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, a position usually reserved for the student achieving the top academic rank in the class. He received his law degree in 1933.

An offer to join the Yale faculty capped Fortas' laudable law school career. Before he could begin his teaching duties, however, he left for Washington to plunge into the New Deal as a member of the legal staff of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. William O. Douglas (also a future justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) called him from there to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. During these years Fortas managed to hold his faculty position at Yale while participating in the whirlwind life of a New Dealer. In 1935 he married Carolyn Eugenia Agger, whom he had met while at Yale.

Fortas left academics in 1939, however, to work under the tutelage of Harold lckes as general counsel of the Public Works Administration. The formidable lckes was so impressed with Fortas' work that in 1942 he promoted him to be his undersecretary of the Department of the Interior. Fortas continued to serve in the Franklin Roosevelt administration throughout World War II. When the conflict ended, Fortas joined his former Yale law professor, Thurman Arnold, as a partner in the new firm of Arnold & Fortas, which was to become one of Washington, D.C.'s most successful and prominent law firms. Later his wife became one of the firm's partners. She and her husband had no children.

One of the many contacts Abe Fortas made during his New Deal years was with a young congressman from Texas, Lyndon Johnson. In 1948 he defended Johnson in a challenge to his Texas Democratic senatorial primary victory. This marked the beginning of Fortas' long friendship with Johnson. In 1964 LBJ won the presidency in his own right, after having completed the term of the assassinated John F. Kennedy. Fortas declined Johnson's offer to name him attorney general.

In 1965 President Johnson persuaded Justice Arthur J. Goldberg to accept an appointment to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. On July 28, 1965, after two decades of private practice, Fortas was nominated by Johnson to replace Goldberg on the Supreme Court. LBJ's memoirs describe his reasons for nominating Fortas to be an associate justice: "I was confidant that the man [Fortas] would be a brilliant and able jurist. He had the experience and the liberalism to espouse the causes that both I and Arthur Goldberg believed in. He had the strength of character to stand up for his own convictions, and he was a humanitarian." Johnson was also interested in continuing the tradition of the Supreme Court's "Jewish seat." So, in all categories, Fortas was the perfect nominee. The Senate confirmed him by a voice vote on August 11, 1965.

In 1968 Chief Justice Earl Warren announced his decision to retire. Johnson had declared that he would not run in the November presidential election, but he sought to nominate Fortas to become chief justice before he left office. During the confirmation process, the U.S. Senate found that Fortas had counseled Johnson on national policy even after he had become a Supreme Court justice. It was also revealed that Fortas had received $15,000 to conduct a series of university seminars in the summer of 1968. In October of 1968 a filibuster in the Senate stalled Fortas' confirmation. Amid charges of cronyism from Democrats and Republicans, Johnson withdrew the nomination.

Even before his elevation to the Supreme Court Fortas had been a noted civil libertarian. In fact, the Supreme Court had appointed him as counsel for the indigent Clarence Earl Gideon, whose famous 1963 case of Gideonv. Wainwright set the precedent for the right to counsel in virtually all criminal cases. Once on the Court, Fortas wrote the majority opinion for the 7:2 decision in Tinkerv. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969). The Court ruled that students have a right, under the First Amendment, to engage in peaceful, nondisruptive protest. The public school had banned the wearing of black armbands by students to protest the Vietnam War. The Court found that the armbands were not disruptive and that the school had violated the students' First Amendment rights, which protect the freedom of oral and symbolic speech.

In May of 1969 LIFE magazine charged Fortas with unethical behavior. The magazine revealed that in 1966 Fortas had received $20,000 from the family foundation of Louis Wolfson, an indicted stock manipulator. This was the first of what was to be a series of annual payments. Fortas had returned the money, however, and terminated the relationship. There was some talk of impeachment in Congress, and Fortas decided to resign from the Court on May 14, 1969. In his letter of resignation Fortas asserted his innocence and stated that he was leaving his position to allow the Court "to proceed with its work without the harassment of debate concerning one of its members." He returned to his private practice and died, at the age of 71, on April 5, 1982.

Further Reading

Kalman, Laura, Abe Fortas: a biography, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Murphy, Bruce Allen, Fortas: the rise and ruin of a Supreme Court Justice, New York: W. Morrow, 1988.

For more information on Abe Fortas, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: June 19, 1910, Memphis, Tenn.
• Education: Southwestern College, B.A., 1930; Yale Law School, LL.B., 1933
• Previous government service: assistant director, corporate reorganization study, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1934–37; assistant director, public utilities commission, Securities and Exchange Commission, 1938–39; counsel to the bituminous coal division, Department of the Interior, 1939–41; director, Division of Power, Department of the Interior, 1941–42; undersecretary of the interior, 1942–46
• Appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson July 28, 1965; replaced Arthur J. Goldberg, who resigned
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Aug. 11, 1965, by a voice vote; resigned May 14, 1969
• Died: Apr. 5, 1982, Washington, D.C.

Abe Fortas was the son of Jewish immigrants from England who settled in Tennessee. Through his hard work and intelligence, Fortas won scholarships to Southwestern College and Yale Law School and eventually established a very successful legal practice.

In 1948, Fortas successfully defended Lyndon B. Johnson, a member of Congress from Texas. Johnson's election victory had been challenged in court by his opponent, who charged that Johnson won through illegal procedures. Lyndon Johnson never forgot Fortas's help during a critical moment in his political career. After becoming President, Johnson appointed Abe Fortas to the Supreme Court to replace Arthur Goldberg, whom he had encouraged to resign by offering Goldberg the position of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Abe Fortas had won national recognition two years before his appointment to the Supreme Court because he was the winning attorney in the landmark Supreme Court case of Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). This case established the right of a poor person to be provided with a lawyer by a state government in all criminal cases involving alleged violations of state law. This case reversed the Court's decision in Betts v. Brady (1942) and was a significant step forward in the gradual “incorporation” of individual rights in the Bill of Rights under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

Fortas showed a strong commitment to the rights of individuals during his brief term on the Court. His two most important opinions involved the rights of children: In re Gault (1967) and Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969).

The Gault decision extended to juvenile offenders due process rights of the 5th and 14th Amendments that were previously limited to adults. The Tinker decision expanded the 1st Amendment freedom of speech right to include “symbolic speech” expressed through the wearing of black arm bands by students in school to protest U.S. participation in the Vietnam War. Fortas argued that a public school's ban on this form of protest was a violation of a student's right to free speech, as long as this form of protest did not disrupt the functioning of the school or violate the rights of other individuals. Fortas wrote, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In 1968, Fortas's Supreme Court term came to an abrupt and unhappy end. President Johnson nominated Fortas to be chief justice, replacing Earl Warren, who was retiring. But many senators opposed this appointment, and Johnson was pressured to withdraw the nomination. During this controversy, critics of Fortas charged that he had acted improperly in accepting a large fee, raised by donations from friends and former clients, to teach a course at American University. Several months later, a Life magazine article claimed that Justice Fortas behaved wrongly in accepting a large fee from a former client in return for serving on a charitable foundation. The Life article also reported that Fortas had returned the money.

These charges influenced some members of Congress to discuss the possibility of starting impeachment proceedings against Fortas in order to remove him from the Court. Fortas strongly denied any improper or illegal activity, but he decided to resign from the Court and returned to private law practice. Thus, he was the first justice to leave the Court because of the threat of impeachment.

See also Gideon v. Wainwright; In re Gault; Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District

Sources

• Laura Kalman, Abe Fortas: A Biography(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
• James F. Shogan, A Question of Judgment: The Fortas Case and the Struggle for the Supreme Court (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972)

(fôr'təs) , 1910–82, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1965–69), b. Memphis, Tenn. After receiving his law degree from Yale in 1933, he taught there (1933–37) and also held a variety of government posts. He was (1942–46) undersecretary of the interior before entering private law practice. Among his notable contributions to criminal law were his arguments in the Durham Case (1954), which helped broaden the definition of legal insanity, and in Gideon v. Wainwright (1962), in which the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that states must assure free legal counsel to the poor in every criminal trial. A close friend and adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, he was appointed by the president to succeed Arthur Goldberg on the Supreme Court. There he continued to support the expansion of criminal rights and joined with the other liberal justices in most civil liberties cases. In antimonopoly cases, he often sided with the minority in upholding business. In 1968, President Johnson nominated Fortas as chief justice of the United States; Republicans and Southern Democrats held a Senate filibuster against the nomination, causing President Johnson to withdraw Fortas's nomination. The following year, Fortas resigned from the court after it was revealed that he had, while on the bench, accepted $20,000 from a private foundation; the money was part of a life stipend to Fortas by the foundation. Although he returned the money, Fortas resigned from the court under public pressure, the first justice to do so.

Bibliography

See R. Shogan, A Question of Judgment: The Fortas Case and the Struggle for the Supreme Court (1972).

Abe Fortas served as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1965 to 1969. A renowned and powerful Washington, D.C., attorney before he joined the Court, Fortas resigned from the bench in disgrace after allegations of unethical behavior led to calls for his impeachment.

Fortas was born June 19, 1910, in Memphis, to English immigrant Jews. He graduated from Southwestern College, in Memphis, in 1930 and received a law degree from Yale Law School in 1933. An outstanding student at Yale, Fortas became a protégé of William O. Douglas, a member of the school's faculty and a future Supreme Court justice. Following graduation Fortas divided his time between Yale and Washington, D.C., serving as an assistant professor at the school and working in several federal government agencies.

Fortas's arrival in Washington, D.C., coincided with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Under Roosevelt the federal government greatly expanded as it assumed more regulatory power over the national economy. Fortas severed his connections with Yale in 1937 and went to work full-time for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was chaired by Douglas.

Fortas proved to be an effective administrator. He joined the Department of the Interior in 1939 and soon became a confidant of Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. Ickes, a powerful member of the Roosevelt administration, named Fortas undersecretary in 1942. Fortas served in that position until 1946, when he left government to start a private law firm.

Fortas and Thurman W. Arnold, a former law professor and chief of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, created the firm of Arnold and Porter to help corporations and other powerful interest groups deal with the new federal bureaucracy. Fortas knew his way around the halls of power and became an influential lobbyist and interpreter of government regulations in post-World War II Washington, D.C.

His path to the Supreme Court began in 1948, when he led the legal team that fought to place Lyndon B. Johnson's name on the Texas election ballot for U.S. senator. Johnson, a Texas congressman in the 1940s, got to know Fortas while Fortas was at the Department of the Interior. The 1948 Texas Democratic primary election gave Johnson an eighty-seven-vote margin of victory, but his opponent, Coke R. Stevenson, alleged that Johnson's supporters had stuffed the ballot box with phony ballots. After Stevenson filed suit in federal court, a judge removed Johnson's name from the final election ballot, pending an investigation into the alleged election irregularities. Fortas convinced Justice Hugo L. Black, of the Supreme Court, to order the restoration of Johnson's name, pursuant to Black's judicial power to review the actions of the federal courts in Texas. Johnson was elected to the Senate and became majority leader in 1955. He was elected vice president of the United States in 1960 and became president November 22, 1963, following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Though Fortas served the powerful, he also provided pro bono (unpaid) legal services to those with pressing legal issues. His most famous pro bono case was Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 83 S. Ct. 792, 9 L. Ed. 2d 799 (1963). A Florida court had convicted Clarence Gideon, a drifter and small-time gambler, of breaking into a poolroom and removing the change from a vending machine. Gideon could not afford an attorney and the court would not appoint one. Gideon prepared his own appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that denial of legal counsel because a person could not afford an attorney was unconstitutional. The Court accepted his appeal and appointed Fortas to serve as his attorney.

Fortas convinced the Court to overrule its precedent in Betts v. Brady, 316 U.S. 455, 62 S. Ct. 1252, 86 L. Ed. 1595 (1942), in which it held that an ordinary person charged with a felony could do an adequate job of personal defense and was not entitled to the appointment of an attorney. In his majority opinion for Gideon, Justice Black ruled that an indigent defendant in a criminal trial had a constitutional right to a court-appointed attorney. In so ruling, the Court incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel, thus making that right applicable to state as well as federal criminal proceedings.

When Johnson assumed the presidency, he looked to Fortas as a confidential adviser. Johnson wished to appoint Fortas to the Supreme Court, but there were no vacancies. He convinced Justice Arthur J. Goldberg to resign from the Court in 1965 to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Goldberg left the Court reluctantly, and Johnson nominated Fortas to fill its so-called Jewish seat. The "Jewish seat" began with the 1939 appointment of Felix Frankfurter, who was Jewish, to succeed Justice Benjamin Cardozo, also Jewish. It was assumed that for political reasons, Democratic presidents would appoint a Jewish person to that vacancy. This tradition ended with the appointment of Fortas.

Fortas fit in well with the liberal Court, then headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Concerned with policy more than precedent, Fortas was a strong defender of civil rights and civil liberties. His two most significant opinions dealt with the rights of children. The 1967 landmark case In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1, 87 S. Ct. 1428, 18 L. Ed. 2d 527, changed the nature of the juvenile law system. Fortas and the Court essentially made the juvenile courts adhere to standards of due process, applying most of the procedural safeguards enjoyed by adults accused of crimes. Under Gault juvenile courts were to respect the right to counsel, the right to freedom from compulsory self-incrimination, and the right to confront hostile witnesses.

Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 89 S. Ct. 733, 21 L. Ed. 2d 731 (1969), accorded juveniles First Amendment rights. Des Moines high school officials had suspended students for wearing black armbands to school to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. On appeal Fortas rejected the idea that the school's response was reasonable because it was based on the fear that a disturbance would result from the wearing of armbands. Fortas ruled that the wearing of armbands was "closely akin to ‘pure speech' which … is entitled to comprehensive protection under the First Amendment." He added that public school officials could not ban expression out of the "mere desire to avoid discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint."

In June 1968 Chief Justice Warren announced that he would retire. President Johnson nominated Fortas to succeed Warren, but the political mood of the Senate was hostile to the nomination. It had been an open secret in Washington, D.C., that Fortas continued to advise the president after joining the Court. Fortas was a key participant in Vietnam War policymaking. Some senators were troubled by his breach of the separation of powers; others, especially conservatives, attacked his liberal voting record on the Court. Republicans hoped to derail the nomination so as to give Richard M. Nixon, then running for the presidency, the opportunity to appoint a more conservative chief justice. Johnson, who had already announced he would not run for reelection, was a lame duck and could do nothing to help Fortas. Opponents conducted a filibuster when the appointment was brought to the Senate floor. In October Fortas, sensing defeat, asked that his name be withdrawn from consideration. Warren remained on the Court until 1969, when President Nixon appointed Warren E. Burger chief justice.

Matters worsened for Fortas in 1969 when Life magazine reported that he had accepted a $20,000 fee from a foundation established by the family of Louis Wolfson, a financier under federal investigation for securities violations. The fee was the first of a series of annual payments that were to be made to Fortas for the duration of his life, and thereafter to his widow until her death, in exchange for Fortas's guidance of the foundation's programs. The arrangement was terminated in 1966 when Fortas returned the money upon Wolfson's indictment.

Despite Fortas's ultimate return of the money, his initial acceptance of it troubled many senators. It was alleged that Fortas had done more than foundation work, giving Wolfson legal advice. The Life article noted that Wolfson had used Fortas's name in the hope of helping himself. Fortas issued an ambiguous statement that did not resolve the situation. The Nixon administration and Republican senators hinted that Fortas should be impeached for his actions, which were contrary to the ethical provision that judges must be free of the appearance of impropriety. Fortas ended the controversy by resigning from the Court May 14, 1969, though he contended he had done nothing wrong. This was the first time in U.S. history that a justice resigned under the threat of impeachment.

Following his resignation Fortas sought to return to his old law firm. When the firm refused to take him back, he set up his own law practice, Fortas and Koven. He resumed advising corporate clients on how to do business in Washington, D.C., and he continued his pro bono work.

Fortas died April 6, 1982, in Washington, D.C.

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