Frank Murphy - Supreme Court

Supreme Court

After a year as Attorney General, on January 4, 1940, Murphy was nominated by Roosevelt to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, filling a seat vacated by Pierce Butler. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 16 and was sworn in on January 18. The timing of the appointment put Murphy on the cusp of the Charles Evans Hughes and the Harlan Fiske Stone courts. Upon the death of Chief Justice Stone, Murphy served in the court led by Frederick Moore Vinson, who was confirmed in 1946.

Murphy took an expansive view of individual liberties, and the limitations on government he found in the Bill of Rights.

Murphy authored 199 opinions: 131 majority, 68 in dissent.

Opinions differ about him and his jurisprudential philosophy. He has been acclaimed as a legal scholar and a champion of the common man. Justice Felix Frankfurter disparagingly nicknamed Murphy "the Saint", criticizing his decisions as being rooted more in passion than reason. It has been said he was "Neither legal scholar nor craftsman" who was criticized "for relying on heart over head, results over legal reasoning, clerks over hard work, and emotional solos over team play."

Murphy's support of African-Americans, aliens, criminals, dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses, Native Americans, women, workers, and other outsiders evoked a pun: “tempering justice with Murphy.” As he wrote in Falbo v. United States (1944), “The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.” (p. 561)

According to Frankfurter, Murphy was part of the more liberal "Axis" of justices on the Court, along with Justices Rutledge, Douglas, and Black; the group would for years oppose Frankfurter's judicially-restrained ideology. Douglas, Murphy, and then Rutledge were the first justices to agree with Hugo Black's notion that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights protection into it; this view would later become law.

Murphy is perhaps most well known for his vehement dissent from the court's ruling in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the constitutionality of the government's internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Murphy sharply criticized the majority ruling as "legalization of racism."

This was the first time that the word "racism" found its way into the lexicon of words used in Supreme Court opinion (he used it twice in a concurring opinion in Steele v. Louisville & Nashville R. Co. 323 U.S. 192 (1944) issued that same day). He would use that word in five separate opinions. However the word "racism" disappeared with Murphy and from the court for almost two decades, not reappearing until the landmark decision of Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) which struck down as unconstitutional the Virginia anti-miscegenation statute. See also Jim Crow laws.

Though Murphy was serving on the Supreme Court during World War II, he still longed to be part of the war effort. Consequently, during recesses of the Court, he served in Fort Benning, Georgia as an infantry officer.

On January 30, 1944, almost exactly one year before Allied liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on January 27, 1945, Justice Murphy unveiled the formation of the National Committee Against Nazi Persecution and Extermination of the Jews. Serving as committee chair, he stated it was created to combat Nazi propaganda "breeding the germs of hatred against Jews." The announcement was made on the 11th anniversary of Adolf Hitler becoming Chancellor of Germany. The eleven committee members included U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilkie and Henry St. George Tucker, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

He acted as chairman of the National Committee against Nazi Persecution and Extermination of the Jews and of the Philippine War Relief Committee. The first committee was established in early 1944 to promote rescue of European Jews, and to combat antisemitism in the United States.