Justice Frank Murphy
Today’s Justice of the Day is: FRANK MURPHY. Justice Murphy was born on this day, April 13, in 1890.
Justice Murphy was born in Sand Beach, Michigan, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He earned an A.B. from the University of Michigan in 1912, and graduated from the University of Michigan Law School with an LL.B. in 1914.
Immediately upon graduation from law school, Justice Murphy launched his career in private practice in Detroit, Michigan, where he would work from then to 1917 and 1922 to 1923. During the five year-long break in his work as a private attorney, he was a United States Army First Lieutenant (from 1917 to 1919), Chief Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan (from 1919 to 1922), and a candidate for the United States House of Representatives from his home state (in 1920). In 1922 Justice Murphy began working as a Professor of Law at the University of Detroit, where he world work continuously for the next half-decade. The year after beginning his professorship, he became a Judge of the Detroit Recorder’s Court, and remained there until 1930, the year he began a three year-long term as the Mayor of Detroit. Justice Murphy left the mayor’s office and subsequently worked as Governor General and High Commissioner of the Philippine Islands (today called the Philippines) for three years (beginning in 1933), before starting a year-long stint as Governor of Michigan in 1937. In 1939 he took office as Attorney General of the United States, a position he would hold until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Murphy was nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 4, 1940, to a seat vacated by Justice Pierce Butler. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 16, and received his commission on January 18. Justice Murphy took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on February 5, and served on the Hughes, Stone, and Vinson Courts. His service was terminated on July 19, 1949, due to his death.
Justice Murphy is one of the least well-known Members of the SCUS who served during the mid-20th century. He was an unabashed liberal in his time, even founding the Department of Justice’s first civil rights unit during his tenure as Attorney General. Justice Murphy dissented in one of the modern SCUS’s most erroneously-decided cases, Korematsu v. United States (1944), wherein the majority upheld the internment of Japanese Americans on the grounds that the government must be given (seemingly limitless) leeway during times of national emergency.