92 Facts About Hugo Black

Hugo Lafayette Black was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a US Senator from Alabama from 1927 to 1937 and as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971.

Hugo Black was the first of nine Roosevelt appointees to the court, and he outlasted all except for William O Douglas.

The fifth longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history, Hugo Black was one of the most influential Supreme Court justices in the 20th century.

For much of his career, Hugo Black was considered strongly liberal.

Hugo Black attended Ashland College, an academy located in Ashland, then enrolled at the University of Alabama School of Law.

In 1907, Hugo Black moved to the growing city of Birmingham, where he built a successful practice that specialized in labor law and personal injury cases.

In 1912, Hugo Black resigned to return to practicing law full time.

Hugo Black served in the 81st Field Artillery, and attained the rank of captain as the regimental adjutant.

Hugo Black joined the Birmingham Civitan Club during this time, eventually serving as president of the group.

Hugo Black remained an active member throughout his life, occasionally contributing articles to Civitan publications.

Hugo Black further stated that when he resigned he completely discontinued his Klan association, that he had never resumed it, and that he expected never to resume his membership.

Josephine died in 1951; in 1957, Hugo Black married Elizabeth Seay DeMeritte.

In 1926, Hugo Black sought election to the United States Senate from Alabama, following the retirement of Senator Oscar Underwood.

Hugo Black publicly denounced the "highpowered, deceptive, telegram-fixing, letterframing, Washington-visiting" lobbyists, and advocated legislation requiring them to publicly register their names and salaries.

In 1935, during the Great Depression, Hugo Black became chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, a position he would hold for the remainder of his Senate career.

The national audience was shocked to hear Hugo Black speak of a $5million electric industry lobbying campaign attempt to defeat the Wheeler-Rayburn bill, known as the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 that had passed in July.

Hugo Black gave a dramatic speech on this four-decade-long political battle.

Hugo Black came to see the actions of the anti-New Deal Supreme Court as judicial excess; in his view, the court was improperly overturning legislation that had been passed by large majorities in Congress.

In 1935 Hugo Black led a filibuster of the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill.

Hugo Black was criticized for his presumed bigotry, his cultural roots, and his Klan membership, when that became public.

Chambers v Florida, an early case where Black ruled in favor of African-American criminal defendants who experienced due process violations, later helped put these concerns to rest.

Hugo Black was sworn into office on August 19,1937.

Hugo Black vigorously defended the "plain meaning" of the Constitution, rooted in the ideas of its era, and emphasized the supremacy of the legislature; for Hugo Black, the role of the Supreme Court was limited and constitutionally prescribed.

In 1939 Hugo Black was joined on the Supreme Court by Felix Frankfurter and William O Douglas.

From 1945 until 1971, Hugo Black was the Senior Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

However, the coal company requested the court rehear the case on the grounds that Justice Hugo Black should have recused himself, as the mine workers were represented by Hugo Black's law partner of 20 years earlier.

In 1948, Justice Hugo Black approved an order solicited by Abe Fortas that barred a federal district court in Texas from further investigation of significant voter fraud and irregularities in the 1948 Democratic primary election runoff for United States Senator from Texas.

Hugo Black dissented, claiming that the law violated the First Amendment's free speech clause.

Hugo Black's jurisprudence is among the most distinctive of any members of the Supreme Court in history and has been influential on justices as diverse as Earl Warren, and Antonin Scalia.

Hugo Black's jurisprudence had three essential components: history, literalism, and absolutism.

Third, Hugo Black's absolutism led him to enforce the rights of the Constitution, rather than attempting to define a meaning, scope, or extent to each right.

Hugo Black intensely believed in judicial restraint and reserved the power of making laws to the legislatures, often scolding his more liberal colleagues for what he saw as judicially created legislation.

Hugo Black opposed enlarging constitutional liberties beyond their literal or historic "plain" meaning, as he saw his more liberal colleagues do.

Whereas Hugo Black voted with the majority under strict construction to uphold the state constitutional provision, his colleagues Douglas and Fortas dissented.

Hugo Black argued that the US Constitution does not dictate how a state must choose its governor.

Hugo Black was noted for his advocacy of a textualist approach to constitutional interpretation.

Hugo Black claimed that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment's reference to takings of "life", and to "capital" crimes, meant approval of the death penalty was implicit in the Bill of Rights.

Hugo Black was not persuaded that a right of privacy was implicit in the Ninth or Fourteenth amendments, and dissented from the court's 1965 Griswold decision which invalidated a conviction for the use of contraceptives.

Justice Hugo Black rejected reliance on what he called the "mysterious and uncertain" concept of natural law.

Hugo Black was, in addition, an opponent of the "Living Constitution" theory.

Hugo Black insisted that judges rely on the intent of the Framers as well as the "plain meaning" of the Constitution's words and phrases when deciding a case.

Hugo Black additionally called for judicial restraint not usually seen in court decision-making.

Hugo Black stated that the legislature "was fully clothed with the power to govern and to maintain order".

Hugo Black held an expansive view of legislative power, whether that be state or federal, and would often vote against judicial review of state laws that could be struck down under the Commerce Clause.

In several other federalism cases Hugo Black ruled against the federal government.

Hugo Black had previously dissented in support of this view in Baker predecessor case, Colegrove v Green.

However, during his tenure on the bench, Hugo Black established a record more sympathetic to the civil rights movement.

Hugo Black joined the majority in Shelley v Kraemer, which invalidated the judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants.

Hugo Black tended to favor law and order over civil rights activism.

Hugo Black opposed the actions of some civil rights and Vietnam War protesters and believed that legislatures first, and courts second, should be responsible for alleviating social wrongs.

Hugo Black once said he was "vigorously opposed to efforts to extend the First Amendment's freedom of speech beyond speech", to conduct.

Hugo Black believed that the First Amendment erected a metaphorical wall of separation between church and state.

Hugo Black delivered the opinion of the court in Everson v Board of Education, which held that the establishment clause was applicable not only to the federal government, but to the states.

Justice Hugo Black is often regarded as a leading defender of First Amendment rights such as the freedom of speech and of the press.

Hugo Black refused to accept the doctrine that the freedom of speech could be curtailed on national security grounds.

Hugo Black rejected the idea that the government was entitled to punish "obscene" speech.

Hugo Black delivered the majority opinion in Adderley v Florida, controversially upholding a trespassing conviction for protesters who demonstrated on government property.

Hugo Black dissented from Tinker v Des Moines, in which the Supreme Court ruled that students had the right to wear armbands in schools, writing,.

Hugo Black asserted that this activity "was mainly conduct, and little speech".

Hugo Black was often labeled an 'activist' because of his willingness to review legislation that arguably violated constitutional provisions.

Hugo Black maintained that literalism was necessary to cabin judicial power, which informed his dissent in Anastaplo.

Hugo Black adopted a narrower interpretation of the Fourth Amendment than many of his colleagues on the Warren Court.

Hugo Black dissented from Katz v United States, in which the court held that warrantless wiretapping violated the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.

Hugo Black argued that the Fourth Amendment only protected tangible items from physical searches or seizures.

Justice Hugo Black originally believed that the Constitution did not require the exclusion of illegally seized evidence at trials.

In other instances Hugo Black took a fairly broad view of the rights of criminal defendants.

Hugo Black joined the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Miranda v Arizona, which required law enforcement officers to warn suspects of their rights prior to interrogations, and consistently voted to apply the guarantees of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments at the state level.

One of the most notable aspects of Justice Hugo Black's jurisprudence was the view that the entirety of the federal Bill of Rights was applicable to the states.

Hugo Black's theory attracted the support of Justices such as Frank Murphy and William O Douglas.

The most prominent opponents of Hugo Black's theory were Justices Felix Frankfurter and John Marshall Harlan II.

Justice Hugo Black was well known for his rejection of the doctrine of substantive due process.

Hugo Black believed that this interpretation of the due process clause was unjustifiably broad.

Hugo Black advocated equal treatment by the government for all persons, regardless of wealth, age, or race.

Hugo Black did not tie procedural due process exclusively to the Bill of Rights, but he did tie it exclusively to the Bill of Rights combined with other explicit provisions of the Constitution.

None of Hugo Black's colleagues shared his interpretation of the due process clause.

Hugo Black was one of the Supreme Court's foremost defenders of the "one man, one vote" principle.

Hugo Black delivered the opinion of the court in Wesberry v Sanders, holding that the Constitution required congressional districts in any state to be approximately equal in population.

Hugo Black concluded that the Constitution's command "that Representatives be chosen 'by the People of the several States' means that as nearly as is practicable one man's vote in a congressional election is to be worth as much as another's".

Hugo Black criticized the court for exceeding its "limited power to interpret the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause" and for "giving that clause a new meaning which it believes represents a better governmental policy".

Hugo Black dissented from Kramer v Union Free School District No 15, in which a majority struck down a statute that prohibited registered voters from participating in certain school district elections unless they owned or rented real property in their local school district, or were parents or guardians of children attending the public schools in the district.

Consistent with his view that the equal protection clause had a limited meaning, Hugo Black did not believe illegitimate children were a suspect class, and he applied only rational basis review to laws that were discriminatory toward such children.

Hugo Black reasoned that for a state to treat illegitimate children worse than legitimate children is scarcely any different than treating "concubines" worse than wives, or treating other relatives of a person worse than any other relatives.

Justice Hugo Black admitted himself to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, in August 1971, and subsequently retired from the court on September 17.

Hugo Black's remains were interred at the Arlington National Cemetery.

Hugo Black is one of fourteen Supreme Court justices buried at Arlington.

Ball found regarding the Klan that Hugo Black "sympathized with the group's economic, nativist, and anti-Catholic beliefs".

Newman said Hugo Black "disliked the Catholic Church as an institution" and gave numerous anti-Catholic speeches in his 1926 election campaign to Ku Klux Klan meetings across Alabama.

Hugo Black was twice the subject of covers of Time magazine: On August 26,1935, as a United States Senator; and on October 9,1964, as an associate justice.

In 1987, Congress passed a law sponsored by Alabama representative Ben Erdreich, designating the new courthouse building for the US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama in Birmingham, as the "Hugo L Black United States Courthouse".

Justice Hugo Black is honored in an exhibit in the Bounds Law Library at the University of Alabama School of Law.

Hugo Black served on the Supreme Court for thirty-four years, making him the fifth longest-serving Justice in Supreme Court history.

Hugo Black was the senior justice on the court for an unprecedented twenty-five years, from the death of Chief Justice Stone on April 22,1946, to his own retirement on September 17,1971.