Stewart, Potter

Stewart, Potter, 1915–85, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1958–81), b. Jackson, Mich. After receiving (1941) his law degree from Yale, he was admitted to the Ohio bar. He later practiced law in Cincinnati. A U.S. Circuit Court judge from 1954 to 1958, he was appointed by President Eisenhower to replace Harold H. Burton on the Supreme Court. An advocate of the careful exercise of judicial review, Stewart limited his decisions to narrow questions of law and rarely ruled on broad constitutional issues.

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Stewart, Potter

(born Jan. 23, 1915, Jackson, Mich., U.S.—died Dec. 7, 1985, Hanover, N.H.) U.S. jurist. He studied law at Yale University and was admitted to the bar in New York and Ohio in 1941. After settling in Cincinnati, Ohio, he served on the city council and as vice mayor before his appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1954. In 1958 Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served until 1981. A moderate, he wrote the majority opinion in the Shelton v. Tucker case, which held unconstitutional the requirement that teachers list all the associations to which they belong, and also wrote a memorable dissent in Miranda v. Arizona, in which he argued that the court's decision provided too much protection to defendants and undermined the ability of the police to enforce the law. He is perhaps best remembered for summarizing the difficulty in defining obscenity, writing in a concurring opinion that “I know it when I see it.”

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Stewart, Potter (1915–85) Supreme Court justice; born in Jackson, Mich. He was in private practice and involved in Cincinnati politics when he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals (1954–58). President Eisenhower named him to the U.S. Supreme Court (1959–81) where he took independent and moderate judicial positions.