- For the Indian newspaper editor and British politician, see Stanley Reed
Stanley Forman Reed (December 31, 1884 – April 2, 1980) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1938 to 1957. Reed was born in Mason County, Kentucky, to John Reed, a wealthy physician, and Frances Forman. He received B.A. degrees from both Kentucky Wesleyan College in 1902 and from Yale University in 1906. He studied law at the University of Virginia (where he was a member of St. Elmo Hall), Columbia University, and later studied in France, but he did not obtain a law degree. He served in the Kentucky General Assembly from 1912 to 1916, and enlisted in the United States Army in World War I. After working as a lawyer in Maysville, Kentucky, he became general counsel of the Federal Farm Board from 1929 to 1932 and of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation from 1932 to 1935. As the Solicitor General from 1935 to 1938, he presented the government's arguments for numerous New Deal cases before the Supreme Court, where he was appointed to by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On the bench, Reed was generally considered a moderate and often held the balance between the liberal and the conservative members of the court in split decisions. Reed generally adhered to a narrow interpretation of the Constitution in the spirit of the New Deal. Reed, a Southern Democrat who felt loyal to his home state of Kentucky, only reluctantly joined the Court's opinion in Brown v. Board of Education and reportedly planned to write a dissent at one point during consideration of the case, though Reed had previously joined the Court's opinion in Sweatt v. Painter, mandating the integration of the University of Texas Law School. Many contemporaries (including Chief Justice Warren) believed Reed's decision to join the Brown decision was crucial to that opinion's public acceptance, as Reed's vote made the decision unanimous. After retiring from the Supreme Court in 1957, Reed served for several years as a judge on lower federal courts, particularly in the District of Columbia. An extensive collection of Reed's personal and official papers, including his Supreme Court files, is archived at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where they are open for research. Reed and his wife, Winifred Elgin Reed, had two sons, John A. and Stanley Jr., both New York lawyers.
Trivia
- At the time of Reed's death in 1980, he was the longest-lived Supreme Court Justice in American history.
- He was the last person to serve as a Supreme Court Justice without possessing a law degree.
External links
| Preceded by James Crawford Biggs |
Solicitor General 1935–1938 |
Succeeded by Robert H. Jackson |
| Preceded by George Sutherland |
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States January 31, 1938– February 25, 1957 |
Succeeded by Charles Evans Whittaker |
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