Frank Murphy

Frank Murphy was the Supreme Court justice who dissented in the cases his colleagues later wished they had. He was a Michigan Democrat who was mayor of Detroit through the worst of the Depression, governor-general and then high commissioner of the Philippines, governor of Michigan during the Flint sit-down strike - where he refused to send troops against the strikers and forced General Motors to negotiate - and Roosevelt's attorney general, in which office he created the department's civil liberties unit. He went to the Court in 1940. He dissented in Korematsu, calling the internment of Japanese Americans a legalisation of racism and going through the military's justifications one by one to show they rested on assertions about race rather than evidence - the first use of the word racism in a Supreme Court opinion. He dissented in Yamashita, where the majority upheld the death sentence passed on a Japanese general for atrocities committed by troops he had lost communication with, writing that the proceedings had permitted a victor to try a vanquished commander for the crime of losing and that no charge of a recognised violation of the law of war had been made out. He dissented in Falbo and concurred separately in Thornhill on picketing as protected speech. His colleagues thought him more moralist than lawyer, and the phrase tempering justice with Murphy was current at the time. The opinions have aged better than the joke: Korematsu was formally repudiated by the Court in 2018, in language close to his. He died at fifty-nine. He remained a practising Catholic and a lifelong bachelor, and served in the army in the First World War. He was the only member of the Court to have governed a colony, which informed his view of military authority over civilians. His Korematsu dissent was quoted at length in the 2018 opinion that finally repudiated the decision.

• Lived: 1890 CE – 1949 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: jurist, politician