Word: bench
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...plush cord to swing open a small door and admit you to the Supreme Court of the U. S. Mounting two steps around a partition, you come abruptly into the court chamber. Facing you sit the nine Justices of the U. S. seated augustly behind their long desk-like bench. You immediately identify Chief Justice Taft, ponderous in the centre. The small semicircular chamber is dimly lighted. Faces, features, are not sharp. Level voices fall without echo in the shadows...
Scanning the bench, an inquisitive eye moving to the right, comes to rest upon a large man in the last high-backed chair. Attention is fastened by his breadth of black-gowned shoulder, breadth of fore head, breadth of jaw. Other Justices break in to ask attorneys questions, but this one sits silently intent upon the argument, his square chin cupped in his palm, his elbow propped on the table before him. His light blue eyes are small, concentrated, penetrating. His dark brown hair, quickly parted on the left, looks slightly disarranged. He is Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, the junior...
...five years on the Supreme bench, Justice Stone has displayed a breadth of character and humanity to confound the six Senate critics who voted against his confirmation. They still wonder whether he is a liberal conservative or a conservative liberal. More and more has he joined intellectual forces with those two celebrated dissenters of the bench, Justices Holmes and Brandeis. With them he lined up, for example, against the Court's approval of wiretapping as a means of obtaining Prohibition evidence. Every legal controversy is of deep interest to him. He avoids the specialization of some of his associates...
Only two Chief Justices were promoted from the bench. To one of these, John Rutledge of South Carolina, chosen by President Washington to succeed John Jay, the Senate refused confirmation and he had to resign. Jefferson observed sarcastically to Monroe that Washington's purpose had apparently been "to keep five mouths always gaping for one sugar plum."* But in 1910, when President Taft successfully elevated Edward Douglass White, the precedent was broken...
...Dickinson of the N. Y. Academy of Medicine, her supporters. At the other end of the table sat Assistant U. S, Attorney James E. Wilkinson, with John S. Sumner of the New York Society for Suppression of Vice and Canon William Sheafe Chase of the Episcopal Church. On the bench sat Judge Warren B. Burrows of Connecticut...