THE SUPREME COURT: A Real Pro

One day last week, New York’s Federal Circuit Judge John Marshall Harlan was asked to pick the winner of the Yale-Princeton game. Princetonian Harlan paused, considered, smiled and said: “I don’t want to commit myself.”* Such is the judicious nature of the man President Eisenhower last week named to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Associate Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson (TIME, Oct. 18).

Last of the Chewers. Judge Harlan was bred to the law. His great-grandfather was a Kentucky lawyer, Congressman and state attorney general; his grandfather, for whom he was named, was an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court at 44. Known as the last of the tobacco-chewing judges, the first John Marshall Harlan wrote 703 majority opinions and a whopping 316 dissents in his 33 years, 10 months and 25 days on the bench. Best remembered today was his prophetic 1896 dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. The court’s majority found “separate but equal” facilities for colored people constitutional. Justice Harlan alone objected: “our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” This year the U.S. Supreme Court finally got around to agreeing with him.

The new Justice was born in Chicago (where his father was an attorney and alderman) and attended private schools. At Princeton (’20), he was president of his class three years running and chairman of the Daily Princetonian (a staffer and still a friend: Adlai Stevenson). He won a Rhodes Scholarship (Balliol College), returned to attend New York Law School (class of ’24), and rose to a full partnership in the distinguished Manhattan law firm of Root, Ballantine, Harlan, Bushby & Palmer. Among his most famous cases: the defense of DuPont family members against antitrust charges in connection with General Motors and U.S. Rubber holdings.

A Republican and a good friend of New York’s retiring Governor Thomas E. Dewey (who is expected to join Harlan’s old law firm), Harlan is not inclined to let politics interfere with his judgment, In 1951, as chief counsel of Dewey’s State Crime Commission, he followed the first corruption-strewn leads to the Republican organization on Staten Island.

Youth & Experience. A man of dignity and good humor, Judge Harlan will bring to the Supreme Court comparative youth (he is 55), a reverence for the law and trial-tested experience: he has been a Manhattan trial lawyer for 30 years.

His judicial experience is brief: President Eisenhower appointed him last March to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals embracing New York, Connecticut and Vermont. But this is more judicial experience than most of the present Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court had before they were appointed.— The legal profession and the judiciary were pleased that President Eisenhower did not pay off a political I.O.U. with the Supreme Court appointment but chose Judge Har. Ian because, as one lawyer put it, he is “a real pro.”

* The score: Princeton 21, Yale 14. * Only two of the present Supreme Court Justices had experience on the bench before they were appointed. Justice Sherman Minton served eight years on the U.S. Court of Appeals; Justice Hugo Black was a police judge for a year and a half.