Potter Stewart

Potter Stewart lived from January 23, 1915 to December 7, 1985 and was an American lawyer and judge who served as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1958 to 1981, making major contributions to criminal justice reform, civil rights, access to the courts and Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1941 he served in the Navy Reserve during World War II, then practiced law and served on the Cincinnati city council. President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 1954 and nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1958 to succeed Harold Hitz Burton. Often in the minority on the Warren Court, Stewart emerged as a centrist swing vote on the Burger Court and retired in 1981, succeeded by the first female justice, Sandra Day OConnor. He wrote majority opinions in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., Katz v. United States, Chimel v. California and Sierra Club v. Morton, and dissents in Engel v. Vitale, In re Gault and Griswold v. Connecticut. He is remembered for popularizing the phrase I know it when I see it in a concurrence on obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.