Robert H. Jackson: Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, Germany

About the Author

Robert Houghwout Jackson was born in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania, in 1892. The son of William Eldred and Angelina Houghwout Jackson, he grew up in Frewsburg, New York. The last person to serve as associate justice on the Supreme Court without obtaining a law degree, Jackson passed his bar exam after two years apprenticing for a law firm in nearby Jamestown, New York, and taking a year of course work at Albany Law School in Albany, New York. Following a successful career in private practice, Jackson in 1931 accepted a nomination from then governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve on the New York State Commission to Investigate the Administration of Justice. This was to prove formative for his career, much of which focused on the problems inherent in the criminal justice system, such as equality before the law and the pursuit of justice and truth rather than simply pursuit of convictions.

Jackson carried this approach with him into federal service, where he served in the Department of Internal Revenue and as assistant attorney general in the Tax Division and the Antitrust Division, before being named solicitor general in 1938 and then U.S attorney general in 1940. His reputation for fairly pursuing truth and justice as objectively as possible earned him high renown among his peers, and he brought that same resolve to the Supreme Court, to which he was appointed in 1941. Although Jackson was a staunch defender of individual liberties, he nevertheless strove in his opinions to delineate both individual rights and liberties and the constitutional powers of the state and federal governments, leaving behind a nuanced intellectual legacy.

Jackson's chief legacy, however, rests on the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals, which he was instrumental in creating and seeing through. In the closing days of World War II, one of President Harry Truman's first actions in office was to ask Jackson to represent the United States in the creation of a postwar criminal tribunal to bring the deposed heads of the Nazi state to justice. The Allies had agreed in principle to such proceedings earlier in the war, and Jackson worked throughout the summer of 1945 to turn that agreement into a working tribunal. His efforts paid off, and on August 8, 1945, the Allies signed the London Charter, outlining the aims and methods of the war crimes tribunal, which began in the fall of 1945. Jackson, selected to serve as U.S. chief of counsel during the proceedings, delivered the opening and closing statements for the first trial, speeches that rank among the most eloquent and important of his career. With the trials in Germany over, Jackson returned to the bench in 1946. On October 9, 1954, Jackson suffered a fatal heart attack and was buried in Frewsburg, New York.