Childhood & Early Life
Potter Stewart was born to James Garfield Stewart and Harriet Loomis Potter. His father was a lawyer and a prominent Republican who had served as the mayor of Cincinnati.
He went to Hotchkiss School and graduated in 1933.
He attended Yale University where he became the chairman of the ‘Yale Daily News’.
He earned his degree in law from Yale Law School in 1941. There he was an editor of the ‘Yale Law Journal’ and was also a member of Phi Delta Phi.
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Career
He joined a firm on Wall Street after graduation though he left to join the U.S. Naval Reserve during the World War II. He attained the rank of lieutenant junior grade and was awarded three battle stars for his services abroad oil tankers.
After his navy stint, he worked in private practice at a big law firm, Dinsmore & Shohl in Cincinnati.
He was elected to the Cincinnati City Council twice during the early 1950s.
In 1954, a vacancy occurred in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and he was appointed to this position.
When Justice of the Supreme Court, Harold Hitz Burton, was to retire, President Dwight Eisenhower nominated Stewart to the Supreme Court in 1959.
At the time of his joining the Supreme Court was divided into two parties with opposing ideologies: liberals and conservatives. He refused to be categorized into either of these and remained a firm moderate with pragmatic views.
The Irvin v. Dowd case was one of his early cases in the Supreme Court. It involved an escaped convicted murderer’s denial of appeal. Stewart played a ‘swing vote’ role in the case.
In the 1962 Engel v. Vitale case, which ruled that encouraging the recitation of an official school prayer was unconstitutional, Stewart was the only justice who dissented.
He dissented along with John Harlan and Byron White in the landmark case Miranda v. Arizona (1966) which significantly impacted law enforcement in the United States. He argued that the court's decision provided too much protection to defendants and undermined the ability of the police to enforce the law.
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He was the lone dissenter in the case, In re Gault (1967) which extended to juveniles, accused of crimes, the same legal rights afforded to adults in the Miranda v. Arizona (1966).
He wrote the majority decision in Katz v. United States (1967). He argued that the Fourth Amendment ‘protects people not places’ and extended the Fourth Amendment protections to electronic surveillance.
While hearing the Furman v. Georgia (1972), Stewart voiced his opinion that biasness and ambiguity could be seen while imposing capital punishment. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that there should be a degree of consistency in the application of death penalty.
In 1976, he extended the 1866 Civil Rights Act to Runyon v. McCrary ruling that conceded that schools should not discriminate against students on the basis of race.
The Whalen v. Row (1977) case involved New York Statutes requiring the reporting and storage of information concerning all Schedule II drug prescriptions. He concurred with the majority decision that the ruling did not violate a citizen’s constitutional right to privacy.
He retired from the Court in 1981. He appeared in a special television series on the United States Constitution after his retirement.
