Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer

About the Author

Hugo Black was born on February 27, 1886, in Clay County, Alabama. He attended public schools and Ashland College in Ashland, Alabama. In 1906 he was graduated from the law department at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa. In that same year he embarked on a law practice, and in 1907 he moved to Birmingham, where he renewed his practice. As a lawyer, Black focused on personal injury suits. Black served in World War I, holding the rank of captain in the Eighty-first Field Artillery and serving as regimental adjutant in the Nineteenth Artillery Brigade from 1917 to 1918. After the war, he returned to Birmingham, where he became a judge on the local police court. He subsequently served as prosecuting attorney for Jefferson County, Alabama.

Black's political career assumed a high trajectory when, in 1926, he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. He was reelected in 1932 and served until he resigned his seat on August 19, 1937, after his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. While he was in the Senate, Black served as chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, became known as a skillful investigator, and defended governmental investigations into corporate and business practices. He was an ardent proponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and an advocate of Roosevelt's ill-fated court-packing plan in 1937, in which Roosevelt sought to increase the size of the Supreme Court so as to neutralize the influence of anti–New Deal justices then sitting on the Court.

Black was rewarded for his hard work and loyalty to the New Deal programs on August 17, 1937, when President Roosevelt nominated him to the Supreme Court. After being confirmed by the Senate, Black took his seat on the Court on October 4, 1937. Following his confirmation, news broke that Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan while practicing law in Alabama. Black effectively laid concerns to rest when he explained that many young lawyers in the South had joined the Klan during that time period if they wanted any clients.

By virtually all accounts, Black is regarded as one of the great Supreme Court justices. He was a staunch defender of civil liberties and remained an advocate of an absolutist approach to freedom of speech throughout his career on the high bench. However, he did admit in Korematsu v. United States (1944) that in certain circumstances civil rights needed to take a backseat to national security concerns, as he authored the Court's opinion upholding the evacuation order of Japanese Americans from their homes on the West Coast.

Justice Black's jurisprudence was characterized by a high regard for the original design. He believed that it was the duty of the Court to apply the intentions of the framers when discernible. He was renowned, moreover, for his advocacy of the concept of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. In fact, Black was one of the most forceful proponents of the position that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had effectively nationalized the Bill of Rights, making it applicable to the states.

He was widely viewed as a champion of First Amendment freedoms. In the area of free speech, for example, he wrote powerful dissents, as in Dennis v. United States (1951), in which he condemned the governmental prosecution and persecution of those who espoused communism. However, he was not willing to extend the protection of free speech as broadly where symbolic speech was concerned, because he drew a distinction between pure speech and its representation in symbols.

Black wrote his last opinion in the landmark case of New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), also known as the Pentagon Papers Case. In that acclaimed opinion, he defended the right of the New York Times and other newspapers to publish the Pentagon Papers—a voluminous study on American involvement in Vietnam—on the ground that the First Amendment prohibited prior restraint and that the American people had a right to know when they had been deceived by their government. Justice Black served on the Court until his resignation on September 17, 1971, just days before his death on September 25, in Bethesda, Maryland.