John Marshall Harlan II

John Marshall Harlan lived from May 20, 1899 to December 29, 1971 and was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1955 to 1971, usually called John Marshall Harlan II to distinguish him from his grandfather, John Marshall Harlan, who served on the Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911. He studied at Upper Canada College, Appleby College and Princeton University, then won a Rhodes Scholarship to study law at Balliol College, Oxford. On returning to the United States in 1923 he worked at the law firm of Root, Clark, Buckner and Howland while studying at New York Law School, later serving as an assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and as a special assistant attorney general of New York. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1954, and a year later President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated him to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Robert H. Jackson. Often characterized as a member of the conservative wing of the Warren Court, Harlan advocated a limited role for the judiciary and adhered closely to precedent, but also urged a broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendments Due Process Clause protecting rights not expressly named in the Constitution, while strongly disagreeing with the doctrine that incorporated the Bill of Rights against the states. He retired gravely ill in September 1971 and died of spinal cancer three months later, succeeded by William Rehnquist.