THE JUDICIARY: Death of a Scholar

Wiley Rutledge had been sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for nearly four years when he was summoned one day to the White House. “Wiley,” said President Roosevelt, “we had a number of candidates for the court who were highly qualified but they didn’t have geography—you have that.”

Wiley Rutledge did, indeed, have geography. Born in Kentucky, the son of a circuit-riding Baptist preacher, he had lived, studied and taught in nine states, from Indiana to New Mexico. But he had more than that to recommend him. Always more a teacher than a practicing lawyer, he had made one reputation as a scholarly law-school dean before he came to Washington, made another on the bench there as an able, hard-working judge. So on Feb. 15, 1943, hearty, dignified Wiley Rutledge became Franklin Roosevelt’s eighth and final appointee to the Supreme Court.

For Human Needs. Lacking the brittle eloquence and flashiness of some of his colleagues, Rutledge became at once a steady, self-effacing addition to the bright young court, and one of its most fervent champions of civil liberties and economic liberalism. “Of what good is the law,” he liked to say, “if it does not serve human needs?”

Justice Rutledge’s vote usually went with the so-called liberal bloc—Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black and the late Frank Murphy. Often Rutledge and Murphy, in their passion for individual liberties, found themselves paired in lonely, bitter dissent.

After the court recessed last June, Wiley Rutledge took his family to Maine for a vacation. There he learned of the death of his close colleague, Frank Murphy (TIME, Aug. 1). And there, last week, in a tiny hospital at York Village where he had lain for eight days in a periodic coma, Wiley Blount Rutledge, 55, died of cerebral hemorrhage.

For Friendship’s Sake? His death raised a delicate problem for President Truman, faced with the necessity of appointing a second new justice within two months. Under ordinary circumstances the appointment almost certainly would go to Rhode Island’s J. Howard McGrath, a Roman Catholic, who had hoped to get Catholic Frank Murphy’s seat but dutifully took the U.S. attorney generalship when Harry Truman chose Tom C. Clark for the job.

But the President, already singed by the reaction to his selection of Politico Tom Clark, was reported not too anxious to lay himself open to the charge of another political appointment so soon. If his anxiety outweighed his friendship for loyal Democrat McGrath, ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the most likely possibilities for Rutledge’s seat seemed to be Wyoming’s Senator Joseph C. O’Mahoney, Justice Harold M. Stephens of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Connecticut Senator Brien McMahon, or former Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson.