Judicial Career
Roosevelt appointed Rutledge to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1939. When Supreme Court justice James F. Byrnes resigned in 1943 to help supervise wartime mobilization, Roosevelt nominated Rutledge to his position. Rutledge was significantly less conservative than Byrnes and he remained a steady ally of Roosevelt throughout his court career.
Rutledge articulated strong liberal positions, particularly in his interpretation of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As associate justice in 1946, he wrote for the court in Kotteakos v. United States, "ur Government is not one of mere convenience or efficiency. It too has a stake, with every citizen, in his being afforded our historic individual protections, including those surrounding criminal trials. About them we dare not become careless or complacent when that fashion has become rampant over the earth."
Rutledge extended this position to dissent from the Supreme Court of the United States's majority in the case of Tomoyuki Yamashita, a Japanese general tried for war crimes after the conclusion of World War II. He wrote:
| “ | More is at stake than General Yamashita's fate. There could be no possible sympathy for him if he is guilty of the atrocities for which his death is sought. But there can be and should be justice administered according to the law... It is not too early, it is never too early, for the nation steadfastly to follow its great constitutional traditions, none older or more universally protective against unbridled power than due process of law in the trial and punishment of men, that is, of all men, whether citizens, aliens, alien enemies or enemy belligerents. | ” |
According to Justice Frankfurter, Rutledge was part of the more liberal "Axis" of justices on the Court, along with Justices Murphy, Douglas, and Black; the group would for years oppose Frankfurter's ideology of judicial restraint. Douglas, Murphy, and then Rutledge were the first justices to agree with Black's notion that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights protection into it; this view would later become law.
Rutledge served on the court until his death. On August 27, 1949, Rutledge was vacationing in Maine. He had a stroke while driving his car and died two weeks later, aged fifty-five. His remains are interred at Green Mountain Cemetery, Boulder, Boulder County, Colorado, USA.
One of Rutledge's law clerks, John Paul Stevens, would himself become a Supreme Court justice in 1975.
Read more about this topic: Wiley Blount Rutledge
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