VOICES: Nine Ohioans have served as justices of the U.S. Supreme Court

Dirk Q. Allen is a former opinion page editor of the Hamilton Journal News. He is a regular contributor.

Dirk Q. Allen is a former opinion page editor of the Hamilton Journal News. He is a regular contributor.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson – Washington D.C. born, Florida raised – has been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Biden.

The 51-year-old Harvard-educated jurist would be just the third Black American to serve on the court … following the late Justice Thurgood Marshall and current Justice Clarence Thomas.

Her nomination led me to wonder how many Ohio jurists have served on the court. The answer came quickly via an April 2017 article in the Dayton Daily News: Nine.

The most recent U.S. Supreme Court Justice from Ohio was Potter Stewart, who served from October 1958 until his retirement in July of 1981 at the relatively young age of 66.

Stewart – the federal courts building in downtown Cincinnati is named for him – replaced Harold Hitz Burton, also one of the nine Ohio Supreme Court jurists, who served from 1945-1958

We think of today’s court as polarized, but Stewart was appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower to a court, according to reports, “controlled by two warring ideological camps and sat firmly at its center.” Yet his appointment was confirmed in the Senate by an overwhelming 70-17 count.

When Stewart retired, he was replaced by the first woman to serve on the court, Sandra Day O’Connor. Jackson would be the 6th woman … four of whom would be serving currently.

Today’s Supreme Court hearings are contentious and the votes regularly much closer than Stewart’s confirmation. The refusal of the Senate to confirm the nomination of Republican Robert Bork in 1987 seemed to throw down the gauntlet – indeed, leading to the term “Borked” when a candidate is seen to be unfairly rejected.

Of course, I look at Robert Bork as the U.S. solicitor general in October 1973 who aided and abetted President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” – when Nixon wanted to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Nixon’s attorney general, Elliot Richardson, and Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to do the deed, so Bork, third in line in the Justice Department, signed the order firing Cox after midnight.

How people could suggest, after that, that Bork should rise to the Supreme Court has always been beyond me.

When the GOP-controlled Senate later countered by refusing to give current Attorney General Merrick Garland a hearing in 2016 – instead of a hearing followed by a “no” vote – that was a political miscalculation that still resonates.

Two Ohioans have served as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – and did so back-to-back. Salmon P. Chase, a Cincinnati City Councilman who was elected to the U.S. Senate before becoming Lincoln’s very capable secretary of the treasury during the Civil War, became Chief Justice in 1864. When he died from a stroke in 1873, fellow Buckeye Morrison Remick Waite of Toledo was an unexpected successor from 1874 until his death in 1888.

In fact, there were Ohioans on the Supreme Court – five of them – from 1830 through 1889. Two more served from 1903-1922, and then Cleveland’s Hitz Burton and Stewart from 1945-1981.

No Ohioan has served lately, and any upcoming Court vacancies would be of the “untimely” variety.

Dirk Q. Allen is a former opinion page editor of the Hamilton JournalNews. He is a regular community contributor.

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