Harlan Fiske Stone (October 11, 1872 – April 22, 1946) was an American attorney who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1925 to 1941 and then as the 12th chief justice of the United States from 1941 until his death in 1946. He also served as the U.S. Attorney General from 1924 to 1925 under President Calvin Coolidge, with whom he had attended Amherst College as a young man. His most famous dictum was that "Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern."
Raised in Western Massachusetts, Stone practiced law in New York City after graduating from Columbia Law School. He became the Dean of Columbia Law School and a partner with Sullivan & Cromwell. During World War I, he served on the U.S. Department of War's Board of Inquiry, which evaluated the sincerity of conscientious objectors. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Stone as the Attorney General. Stone sought to reform the U.S. Department of Justice in the aftermath of several scandals that occurred during the administration of President Warren G. Harding. He also pursued several antitrust cases against large corporations.
In 1925, Coolidge nominated Stone to the Supreme Court to succeed retiring Associate Justice Joseph McKenna, and Stone won U.S. Senate confirmation with little opposition. On the Taft Court, Stone joined with Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis in calling for judicial restraint and deference to the legislative will. On the Hughes Court, Stone and Justices Brandeis and Benjamin N. Cardozo formed a liberal bloc called the Three Musketeers that generally voted to uphold the constitutionality of the New Deal. His majority opinions in United States v. Darby Lumber Co. (1941) and United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938) were influential in shaping standards of judicial scrutiny.
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Stone to succeed the retiring Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice, and the Senate quickly confirmed Stone. The Stone Court presided over several cases during World War II, and Stone's majority opinion in Ex parte Quirin upheld the jurisdiction of a U.S. military tribunal over the trial of eight German saboteurs. His majority opinion in International Shoe Co. v. Washington (1945) was influential with regard to personal jurisdiction. Stone was the chief justice in Korematsu v. United States (1944), ruling the exclusion of Japanese Americans into internment camps as constitutional. Stone served as Chief Justice until his death in 1946. He had one of the shortest terms of any chief justice, and was the first chief justice not to have served in elected office.
Stone was born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, on October 11, 1872, to Fred Lauson Stone and Ann Sophia (née Butler) Stone. When Stone was two years old, his family moved to Western Massachusetts where he grew up. He graduated from Amherst High School. His father wished him to become a scientific farmer, and Stone matriculated at the Massachusetts Agricultural College where he attended classes from 1888 to 1890 and was later expelled at the end of his second year for a scuffle with an instructor. He later enrolled at Amherst College, where he graduated in 1894 Phi Beta Kappa.
From 1894 to 1895, he was the sub master of Newburyport High School in Massachusetts, from which he also taught physics and chemistry. From 1895 to 1896, he was an instructor in history at Adelphi Academy in Brooklyn.
Stone attended Columbia Law School from 1895 to 1898, received an LL.B., and was admitted to the New York bar in 1898. Stone practiced law in New York City, initially as a member of the firm Wilmer and Canfield, which (near the time of William Nivison Wilmer's death in 1907) was renamed Satterlee, Canfield & Stone. Stone's partners there were Herbert Livingston Satterlee (who became Assistant Secretary of the Navy) and George Folger Canfield (an early professor at Columbia Law School). Later, Stone became a partner in what is now a white-shoe law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. He taught at Columbia Law School as a lecturer (1899–1902) and adjunct professor (1902–1905), beginning at a salary of $2,000 that eventually increased to $3,000. He served as the school's dean from 1910 to 1923. He lived in the Colosseum, an apartment building near campus.
During World War I, Stone served for several months on a War Department Board of Inquiry, with Major Walter Kellogg of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Corps and Judge Julian Mack, that reviewed the cases of 2,294 men whose requests for conscientious objector status had been denied by their draft boards. The Board was charged with determining the sincerity of each man's principles, but often devoted only a few minutes to interrogation and rendering a decision. Stone was impatient with men who took advantage of the benefits of life in America – using postage stamps was his example – without accepting the burdens of citizenship. In a majority of cases, the Board's subjects either relinquished their claims or were judged insincere. He later summarized his experience with little sympathy: "The great mass of our citizens subordinated their individual conscience and their opinions to the good of the common cause" while "there was a residue whose peculiar beliefs ... refused to yield to the opinions of others or to force." Nevertheless, he recognized the courage required to persist as a conscientious objector: "The Army was not a bed of roses for the conscientious objector; and the normal man who was not supported in his stand by profound moral conviction might well have chosen active duty at the front as the easier lot."
At the end of the war, he criticized Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer for his attempts to deport aliens based on administrative action without allowing for any judicial review of their cases. During this time Stone also defended free speech claims for professors and socialists. Columbia soon became a center of a new school of jurisprudence, legal realism. Legal realists rejected formalism and static legal rules; instead, they searched for the experiential and the role of human idiosyncrasy in the development of law. Although Dean Stone encouraged the realists, he was condemned by Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler as an intellectual conservative who had let legal education at Columbia fall "into the ruts."
In 1923, disgusted by his conflict with Butler and bored with "all the petty details of law school administration" that he dubbed "administrivia", Stone resigned the deanship and joined the prestigious Wall Street firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. He received a much higher salary and headed the firm's litigation department, which had a large corporation and estate practice (including J.P. Morgan Jr.'s interests). In full‑time private practice for only a brief time, Stone was considered a "hard‑working, solid sort of person, willing on occasion to champion the rights of mankind, but safe nevertheless."
On April 1, 1924, he was appointed United States Attorney General by his Amherst classmate President Calvin Coolidge, who felt Stone would be perceived by the public as beyond reproach to oversee investigations into various scandals arising under the Harding administration. These scandals had besmirched Harding's Attorney General, Harry M. Daugherty, and forced his resignation. In one of his first acts as Attorney General, Stone fired Daugherty's cronies in the Department of Justice and replaced them with men of integrity. As Attorney General, he was responsible for the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover as head of the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation, which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and directed him to remodel the agency so it would resemble Britain's Scotland Yard and become far more efficient than any other police organization in the country. A pro‑active Attorney General, Stone argued many of his department's cases in the federal courts and launched an anti‑trust investigation of the Aluminum Company of America, controlled by the family of fellow cabinet member Andrew Mellon, Coolidge's Secretary of the Treasury.