Owen Roberts

Owen Josephus Roberts lived from May 2, 1875 to May 17, 1955 and was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1930 to 1945, who also led two Roberts Commissions, the first investigating the attack on Pearl Harbor and the second focused on works of cultural value during World War II. Born in Philadelphia, Roberts graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and pursued a legal career; after working as a district attorney in Philadelphia, he was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to investigate the Teapot Dome scandal. After the death of Associate Justice Edward Terry Sanford in March 1930, President Herbert Hoover nominated John J. Parker to fill the vacancy on the Court; the Senate rejected Parker and Hoover quickly nominated Roberts as his second choice, and Roberts was easily confirmed and took his seat in May 1930. On the Hughes Court, Roberts was a swing vote positioned between the conservative Four Horsemen and the liberal Three Musketeers, and along with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes his vote often decided whether President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal legislation would be upheld; his decision to uphold a state minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish has been called the switch in time that saved nine, a reference to the decisions possible role in the defeat of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937 that would have expanded the Court. By the end of Robertss tenure he was the lone sitting justice not appointed by Roosevelt. He was one of three justices, along with Robert H. Jackson and Frank Murphy, to vote against the internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu v. United States, and the lone dissenter in Smith v. Allwright, which ruled white primaries unconstitutional. His relations with his colleagues on the Stone Court became strained and he retired in 1945, later serving as Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School from 1948 to 1951. He died in Chester County, Pennsylvania in 1955.