Eighty years ago today, on Wednesday, November 21, 1945, United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, serving as U.S. Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, delivered to the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg his opening statement in the trial of the principal Nazi war criminals.

The trial, held in Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, a city located in the U.S. occupation zone of what had been Nazi Germany, had begun on November 20.

The World War II Allied nations—the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the French Republic—had, by their August 8, 1945, London Agreement, created the IMT.

In October 1945, Allied nation prosecutors filed with the IMT an indictment charging twenty-four Nazi prisoners and six Nazi organizations with four international crimes: common plan, agreement, and conspiracy; waging aggressive war; committing war crimes; and committing crimes against humanity.

The trial opened on November 20 with prosecutors reading in court this extensive Indictment.

On November 21, twenty individual defendants announced to the IMT their pleas of not guilty. They were Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walter Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Constantin von Neurath, and Hans Fritzsche.

Four other defendants who had been charged originally were not present. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was absent due to illness. Martin Bormann was being tried in absentia. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach had been declared incompetent to stand trial. Robert Ley had committed suicide.

The IMT permitted no defendant to make a speech on November 21. The USSR had agreed to begin the trial only on that condition because its chief prosecutor, General Roman Rudenko, had not yet arrived in Nuremberg.

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Justice Robert H. Jackson then delivered his opening statement. He had been writing and honing it for over a month. The opening paragraphs, transcribed here as he spoke them, explained the entirety of the Nuremberg trial undertaking:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.

This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations, nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories. This inquest represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of fifteen more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times: aggressive war. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of that magnitude that the united nations will lay before Your Honors.

In the prisoners’ dock sit twenty-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now to perceive in these men as captives the power which as Nazi leaders they once dominated most of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world.

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be the living symbols of racial hatreds, terrorism, and of violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and militarism, of intrigue and war-making, which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they have directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names.

Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces that would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom these forces now precariously survive.

What these men stand for we will patiently and temperately disclose. We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events. The catalog of crimes will omit nothing that could be conceived by a pathological pride, cruelty, and lust for power. These men created in Germany, under the Führerprinzip, a National Socialist despotism equaled only in the dynasties of the ancient East. They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards those who were marked as scapegoats. Against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics, and free labor, the Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, and brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian era. They excited the German ambition to be a master race, which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They overran their neighbors. To sustain the master race in their war-making, they enslaved millions of human beings and brought them into Germany, where these hapless creatures now wander as displaced persons. At length bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that they aroused the sleeping strength of imperiled civilization. Its united efforts have ground the German war machine to fragments. But the struggle has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land where a demoralized society struggles to survive. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.

Justice Jackson’s opening statement was lengthy. It was 61 typescript pages on the podium before him. His presentation, which included numerous extemporaneous inserts, amendments, and cuts, lasted until late afternoon. He spoke a preview and summary of evidence to come, including:

• Nazism as systematically planned and criminal;
• the lawless Nazi path to consolidated power in Germany;
• its expansion through aggressive war;
• horrific Nazi war crimes across Europe; and
• Nazi Germany’s persecution and murder of Jews—Jackson stated that “5,700,000 Jews are missing from the countries in which they formerly lived,” and that “History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.”

Justice Jackson also offered a specific and candid explanation of the Allied theory that it was lawful to prosecute individuals, including national, military, and other leaders up to the level of a head of state, for international crimes, including war-making:

Any resort to war—to any kind of a war—is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal. The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.

But if it be thought that the [London] Charter, whose declarations concededly bind us all, does contain new law, I still do not shrink from demanding its strict application by this Tribunal. The rule of law in the world, flouted by the lawlessness incited by these defendants, had to be restored at the cost to my country of over a million casualties, not to mention those of other nations. I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance and strengthen the rule of law by the expenditure of morally innocent lives but that progress in the law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.

It is true, of course, that we have no judicial precedent for the Charter. But international law is more than a scholarly collection of abstract and immutable principles. It is an outgrowth of treaties and agreements between nations and of accepted customs. Yet every custom has its origin in some single act, and every agreement has to be initiated by the action of some state. Unless we are prepared to abandon every principle of growth for international law, we cannot deny that our own day has the right to institute customs and to conclude agreements that will themselves become sources of a newer and strengthened international law. International law is not capable of development by the normal processes of legislation, for there is no continuing international legislative authority. Innovations and revisions in international law are brought about by the action of governments such as those I have cited, designed to meet a change in circumstances. It grows, as did the common law, through decisions reached from time to time in adapting settled principles to new situations. The fact is that when the law evolves by the case method, as did the common law and as international law must do if it is to advance at all, it advances at the expense of those who wrongly guessed the law and learned too late their error. The law, so far as international law can be decreed, had been clearly pronounced when these acts took place. Hence, I am not disturbed by the lack of judicial precedent for the inquiry it is proposed to conduct.

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Justice Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg is rightly remembered as one of the most powerful, eloquent, and important speeches in history.

You can read all of it in many places and publications, including here, at Harvard Law School’s newly-enhanced Nuremberg Trials Project website:

https://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/transcripts/7?seq=94&date=1945-11-21

Very little of the Nuremberg trial was filmed. But some film snippets of Jackson in action, including moments from his opening statement, are online.

Most important, and available in full, is Justice Jackson’s voice at Nuremberg. You can list to the entire audio recording of Jackson’s opening statement here:

Part one of Justice Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg:

Part two of Justice Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg:

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The courtroom witnesses, including the defendants, were moved powerfully by Justice Jackson’s opening. One spectator, writer Erika Mann, gave this note to a friend to pass to Jackson:

Journalist William Shirer, perhaps the dean of the press corps in Nuremberg at the start of the trial, was too ill to attend all of Justice Jackson’s opening. But Shirer witnessed some of it, then read the rest, and then sent this letter to Jackson:

Justice Jackson also was pleased as November 21 ended. The Allied prosecutors, and he leading them, had gotten the case to trial.

Jackson’s prosecutorial team also was happy. They knew that they had done huge and great work to get the trial launched. They were delighted that their leader Jackson, who had written his opening statement in private and not mooted it with many of them, had opened the case so majestically.

And they all knew that they had so much work ahead, including in court.

Colonel Robert G. Storey, Jackson’s executive trial counsel, outlined much of that in this memorandum, which he completed and circulated before November 21 had concluded:

In Spring 1945, Mary Frances Langworthy was eighteen years old. She had left high school without graduating, to work. In that final year of World War II, she was employed in the Washington, D.C. area as a secretary in the United States Department of War.

In Summer 1945, Miss Langworthy’s work became an international adventure. She was detailed to travel to London to join the Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality—the OCC, Justice Robert H. Jackson’s Nazi war crimes prosecution team. Jackson then was negotiating with Allied government counterparts to devise the plan to prosecute surviving Nazi leaders as international arch-criminals while also supervising the U.S. investigative staff in Washington, London, Paris, and elsewhere.

Langworthy and others arrived in London to join Jackson’s OCC on Saturday, July 7, 1945.

The next day, Sunday, July 8, happened to be her 19^th birthday.

Justice Jackson, who was away from London that weekend on a reconnaissance trip to the European continent, knew that Langworthy would be arriving on Saturday, July 7, and that the next day would be her birthday.

So on Friday, July 6, Jackson, before he embarked on his trip, dictated greetings to Langworthy, had them typed, signed the paper, and left it for staff to deliver to her on her birthday.

On July 8, Jackson’s administrative officer, Captain Ralph L. Morgan (Adjutant Generals Department), gave Langworthy this gift from Justice Jackson:

Actually, Justice Jackson did no such thing.

Indeed, I doubt that he heard of Miss Langworthy until the following week.

Jackson returned to London on Wednesday, July 11. In his office “In Box,” he found a note, typed by his secretary. It was paper-clipped to a carbon copy of “his” birthday note to Langworthy.

The cover note memorialized Captain Morgan’s confession, with explanation, that he had forged the “Jackson” note to Langworthy.

Justice Jackson, who was notably kind throughout his life to underlings, and who liked Ralph Morgan, was not irked. In fact, Jackson was pleased. He noted his approval on the confession and put it in his “Out Box.”

In Summer 1945, Fran Langworthy worked as a secretary on the OCC staff in London.

In September 1945, she became part of the large OCC staff in Nuremberg. She worked as a secretary in its offices in the Palace of Justice (the courthouse), assisting Captain Morgan and typing up translators’ and interpreters’ notes.

Langworthy’s work there continued for some months. But she left Nuremberg before the trial concluded in Fall 1946.

Following Nuremberg, Fran Langworthy, later Fran Cronin, later Fran Potter, lived a long life. Across all of it, a highlight, which she sometimes discussed publicly, was Nuremberg and her work for the OCC.

In August 2024, Fran Potter died at age 98. She was, I believe, the last living member of Justice Robert H. Jackson’s OCC.

In two days, we will mark the 80^th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trial.

Nuremberg was a high achievement of the rule of law, of fair prosecution, and of due process. It held individual perpetrators accountable for grave crimes. It produced a vast historical record, available for study and teaching ever since, of what Nazi Germany was and what Nazis did. Nuremberg was justice, in fact and in symbol. It created legal precedents that successors have followed and built upon.

And Nuremberg was done, intentionally, by individuals—it was the achievement of Allied nation leaders and their personnel.

For the United States, the achievements of Nuremberg—choosing the path of law, then planning the first international criminal court, and then conducting a public trial competently and fairly—were in large part the OCC’s, from its boss to its baby.

Remember each of them with admiration and gratitude.

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• Some links—
  Here is video of a 2016 Fran Potter interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfMxeAkYyPI
• Here is a 2016 newspaper profile of Fran Potter: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/10/i_had_no_desire_to_look_into_t.html
• Here is Fran Potter’s August 2024 obituary: https://www.malpezzifuneralhome.com/obituaries/Mary-Frances-Fran-Potter?obId=32661163

On this date eighty years ago, United States Chief of Counsel Justice Robert H. Jackson entered his appearance before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

The Tribunal was preparing to adjudicate the indictment of accused Nazi war criminals. On November 14, 1945, it met in a pretrial session to consider a defense counsel’s motion to suspend proceedings against his client, defendant Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, based on serious illness (brain damage and mental decline).

Justice Jackson began what was to be nine months of work in Palace of Justice Courtroom 600 by formally announcing his lawful status:

Appearing in opposition to this motion, I should, perhaps, first file with the Tribunal my commission from President Truman to represent the United States in this proceeding. I will exhibit the original commission and hand a photostat to the Secretary.

This year marks eighty years since the start of the international criminal trial following World War II of captured Nazi leaders. In May 1945, President Truman appointed Justice Robert H. Jackson to serve as United States chief counsel for these prosecutions. In August 1945, Jackson signed for the U.S. the international agreement creating the court and defining its jurisdiction and procedures. In October 1945, that court, the International Military Tribunal, met for the first time, in Berlin. In November 1945, the trial began in Nuremberg.

In recognition of the 80^th anniversary and Nuremberg’s enduring significance, Smithsonian magazine has just published freelance writer David Noonan’s article, “At Nuremberg, World War II’s Battle Turned to the Courtroom, and an Eloquent Lawyer Helped Lead the Allies to Victory.”

The article is a good introduction to Jackson and Nuremberg, and it is accompanied by information on various Nuremberg films.

Click this link to read the article:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/nuremburg-world-war-ii-battle-turned-courtroom-eloquent-lawyer-lead-allies-victory-180987465/

In June 1945, Owen J. Roberts, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, left Washington before the Court had finished its term and begun its summer recess. He went home “early” to his farm in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia.

Justice Roberts then quit the Supreme Court. He had been a justice for fifteen years. He had turned age 70 a month earlier. He was eligible for a full federal judicial pension. And he was sick of being on the Court—although Justice Roberts admired and was close to some of his Court colleagues, such as Justices Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson, Roberts was estranged from some of the other justices for various reasons, including because he thought that they sometimes behaved unethically and judged politically.

On June 30, Justice Roberts sent his resignation letter—not retirement into senior judicial status; resignation—to President Harry S. Truman. Roberts also wrote to Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, to alert him. Roberts informed the Chief Justice that the White House would announce Roberts’s resignation, and that Stone should keep the information confidential until then.

During summer 1945, President Truman did not move immediately to fill the new Supreme Court vacancy. The president, who had inherited the office when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died three months earlier, was occupied with higher priorities, such as the World War II Allied nations’ occupation of defeated and surrendered Germany; their policies regarding liberated Europe (which Truman traveled to—to Potsdam, in July—to discuss these matters with Stalin, Churchill, and Attlee); deciding to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan’s subsequent surrender, ending World War II fighting in the Pacific; and many domestic economic issues.

In mid-September 1945, President Truman finally acted to nominate a new justice. On Monday, September 17, he called U.S. Senator Harold H. Burton (R.-Ohio) at his Senate office. They had been Senate colleagues and friends—they called each other, still, “Harold” and “Harry.” The president invited Burton to come immediately to the White House.

They met upstairs in the President’s study. President Truman offered Senator Burton nomination to the vacant Supreme Court seat. Truman said that although Burton had been his first thought of who to nominate, the president’s thinking had moved for a time to other possibilities, including current or former federal circuit court judges (and all Republicans by political background) John J. Parker, Orie L. Phillips, and Robert P. Patterson. Truman said that he in fact had offered the position to Patterson, the Undersecretary of War. But Truman explained that he then had pulled this offer back because he needed Patterson to stay in the War Department; Truman soon would be nominating Patterson to become Secretary of War when the incumbent, Henry L. Stimson, retired.

Senator Burton replied to President Truman’s offer of a Supreme Court nomination by saying, “I would not ask for it.” Truman replied, “I know that. I would not appoint you if you did. But I will appoint you if you will take it.” Truman explained his objective: “I just want someone who will do a thoroughly judicial job and not legislate. I know that you will do that because we have talked about it.”

On September 18, President Truman announced his nomination of Senator Burton to serve on the Supreme Court. Truman sent the nomination to the Senate. It referred it to the Judiciary Committee.

Harold Burton was well-qualified by education, law practice, and public life experiences to serve on the Supreme Court. After graduating from Bowdoin College (1909) and Harvard Law School (1912), he had begun to practice law in the west, in Cincinnati. He then moved farther west, practicing energy and railroad law in Utah and then in Idaho. Burton then served as a U.S. Army lieutenant in the Great War (1917-1919). Then he settled in Cleveland, where he practiced law, taught law, became a state legislator, and served as the city’s attorney. He was elected mayor of Cleveland, serving from 1935 through 1940, when he was elected by Ohio voters to serve as a U.S. Senator.

On Friday, September 19, 1945, the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended that the full Senate suspend its rules and confirm President Truman’s nomination of Senator Burton.

That afternoon, eighty years ago today, the Senate did so, unanimously.

Harold Hitz Burton, age 57, was commissioned as a Supreme Court associate justice on September 22, 1945.

Justice Burton served in active status on the Supreme Court until October 1958. Health issues caused him then to retire into senior status. He remained a justice in senior status until his death in 1964.

Among scholars who study Justice Burton and the Supreme Court, he is regarded as a fine person who was a diligent, honest, extremely fair judge. He did not write many opinions, or famous opinions, or write beautifully, or cast many “deciding” votes. He did write, and he left to history, excellent, reliable notes of the Court’s conferences. He also kept, and he left to history, a very fine, factual, interesting, daily diary.

Those things are, in themselves, high forms of Supreme Court service.

In September 1945, eighty years ago, Justice Robert H. Jackson was four-plus months into serving, by appointment of President Truman, as U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals in the European Theater.

At that time, Robert Jackson was still a justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S., but he very much was not of the Court. In springtime 1945, he had juggled his new “Nazi prosecution” job and his Supreme Court work. Then during the Court’s summer recess, he did the new job full time, in Europe and the United Kingdom, including negotiating creation of the world’s first international criminal court.

In September 1945, Justice Jackson returned briefly to Washington. He worked in his Supreme Court chambers and had many meetings, including with President Truman at the White House.

Then Jackson again left Washington, and soon he was in Nuremberg. He spent the next year there, prosecuting the arch-criminal Nazis. He was away without leave from the Supreme Court, which for the next term functioned without him.

On September 10, 2025, I gave online a Supreme Court Historical Society lecture, “Away Without Leave but Back in Washington, Briefly: Nazi Prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson on the Road to Nuremberg, September 1945,” about these significant events.

Here is the link to the lecture video:

Thanks to SCHS, and enjoy!

On Monday, August 11, 2025, Princeton University professor Kim Lane Scheppele was Chautauqua Institution’s 21^st annual Robert H. Jackson Lecturer on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Professor Scheppele’s lecture focused on Robert H. Jackson and constitutional separation of powers. She discussed Robert Jackson’s experiences with and legal work defending presidential power from 1934-1941 when he was a senior official in President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. She then illuminated how Jackson’s 1945-1946 experience prosecuting Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg following World War II caused him as a Supreme Court justice to reassess those views, how his Nuremberg-informed commitment to limits on executive power is reflected in his landmark 1952 concurring opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, the “Steel Seizure Case,” and how the U.S. Supreme Court today is misrepresenting Jackson and Youngstown and dangerously changing U.S. constitutional law to expand executive power.

Click here to watch Professor Scheppele’s Jackson Lecture:

(I am honored to have introduced Professor Scheppele’s lecture.)

* * *Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She is one of the leading U.S. and global experts on authoritarian uses of power, including courts. Click here for her Princeton webpage.

The annual Jackson Lecture at Chautauqua Institution is a leading expert’s consideration of the Supreme Court, its Justices, significant decisions, and related topics in the weeks following the Court’s start of its annual summer recess.

Chautauqua Institution’s twenty-one Jackson Lecturers have been:

• 2005: Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago professor;
• 2006: Linda Greenhouse, New York Times writer and Yale Law School lecturer;
• 2007: Seth P. Waxman, WilmerHale partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2008: Jeffrey Toobin, legal writer and book author;
• 2009: Paul D. Clement, Clement & Murphy PLLC partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2010: Jeff Shesol, historian, communications strategist, and former White House speechwriter;
• 2011: Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate and Amicus podcast host; 2012: Pamela Karlan, Stanford University professor;
• 2013: Charles Fried, Harvard University professor and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2014: Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University professor;
• 2015: Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard University professor;
• 2016: Tracey L. Meares, Yale University professor;
• 2017: Judge Jon O. Newman, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit;
• 2018: Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, of the Supreme Court of Canada;
• 2019: Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2020 (online): Ruth Marcus, then a Washington Post associate editor and columnist and now a New Yorker magazine writer;
• 2021 (online): Melissa Murray, New York University professor and Strict Scrutiny podcast co-host;
• 2022: Reva Siegel, Yale University professor;
• 2023: Justin Driver, Yale University professor;
• 2024: Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania professor; and
• 2025; Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University professor.

Robert H. Jackson, raised in rural western Pennsylvania and rural western New York State, learned to fish when he was a boy. He continued to fish throughout his life. He loved it, as outdoor recreation, as thinking and sometimes writing time, and as a relaxing activity to share with friends.

Beginning in 1934, when Robert Jackson was appointed to his first federal office, he lived in the Washington, D.C., area. He did some fishing there, including on the Chesapeake Bay. He also fished on summertime trips “home” to upstate New York, and sometimes in Canada.

In New York State, one of Robert Jackson’s friends for decades was Donald A. Dailey, of Rochester. Bob Jackson and Don Dailey were active Democrats. They worked together in New York and national Democratic Party politics, including on conventions, campaigns, federal and state patronage appointments (including Dailey’s own, as Postmaster of Rochester), public issues, possible political candidacies, and other political matters.

Jackson and Dailey were close. They got to know each other’s wives and children. They became acquainted with some of each other’s other friends.

Through Dailey, Jackson met another Rochester resident, Louis A. Wehle. He was the president of the Genesee Brewing Company.

Like Jackson and Dailey, Wehle loved to fish. And he owned some special fishing locations. In the 1930s, Jackson, Dailey, Wehle, and others became summer fishing trip buddies. That continued in the 1940s.

In late April 1945, Don Dailey in Rochester sent a letter to Robert Jackson at the Supreme Court. Dailey enclosed, belatedly, photographs (including the one above) from their July 1944 fishing trip in the wilds of Ontario, Canada.

On that 1944 occasion, Bob Jackson had taken an overnight train from Washington to Canandaigua, New York. Don Dailey, with his car and driver, met Jackson there. They were driven to Rochester. They met up with Louis Wehle, Rochester judge James O’Connor, and others. The group took a ferry from Rochester across Lake Ontario to Coburg, Ontario, Canada. A driver met and transported them seventy miles north. They traveled ten more miles by boat to Wehle’s island in Lake Weslenkoon (now called Weslemkoon). They stayed in his log cabin there. For a week, they fished, talked, ate (mostly their catches, predominately black bass), and relaxed.

Now, in April 1945, Dailey was writing his hope that Jackson would join in making plans to do it again in the summer ahead:

Dailey’s letter and the photographs reached Jackson during the April 1945 week when the new President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, was privately recruiting Justice Jackson to be the U.S. chief prosecutor of the leading Nazi war criminals.

President Truman announced publicly his appointment of Jackson, to the job that became serving as chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, on May 2, 1945.

Two days later, Robert Jackson, in the midst of doing two jobs (Supreme Court work as its term was ending, plus the massive tasks of getting started as “Nazi prosecutor”), dictated, signed, and mailed a letter back to his friend Don Dailey:

Jackson’s May 1945 hopes to get back to the U.S. that August to join a Dailey, Wehle, and company fishing trip were in vain.

To my knowledge, Robert Jackson did no fishing—except for staff members, their good behavior, diplomatic concessions by Allies, and evidence against would-be German criminal defendants—in summer 1945.

Jackson also seems not to have done any (real) fishing in the United Kingdom or in Europe during 1945 or 1946.

Robert Jackson did, resuming in summer 1948, go on additional fishing trips with his friends Don Dailey and Louis Wehle. The last one was in July 1954, during Jackson’s final summer.

Thank you to Dailey and Wehle family members the late Robert Emmet (Bob) Dailey, Louise Schaefer Dailey, and Bonnie Wehle for their assistance.

I am very pleased to report that Kim Lane Scheppele will give Chautauqua Institution’s 21st annual Robert H. Jackson Lecture on the Supreme Court of the United States, on Monday, August 11, 2025, at 3:30 p.m.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions.

Professor Scheppele’s research examines the rise and fall of constitutional government. After 1989, she moved to Eastern Europe, living in Hungary and Russia for extended periods, studying the way that new constitutions were being enacted and entrenched. After 9/11, she examined how constitutions fared under the stress of anti-terrorism campaigns with their repressive new laws, both in the United States and elsewhere. After the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, she studied the way that democracies have come under stress, focusing on the rise of new autocrats, particularly those who are elected on populist political platforms and who then use the law to undermine constitutional institutions. Now, she concentrates in particular on changes within the European Union – exploring the way that the EU has had difficulty holding its own against national popular movements that brought about Brexit and the rise of illiberal autocracies among the member states. She has published widely in both social science and law journals, in both Europe and the US. She is a frequent commentator on the Verfassungsblog.

Professor Scheppele’s work has been widely recognized. In 2014, she received the Kalven Prize from the Law and Society Association for scholarship that has had an important influence on the development of socio-legal studies, and in 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also an elected member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and serves as a “global jurist” on the executive committee of the International Association of Constitutional Law. She served as the elected president of the Law and Society Association from 2017-2019. Her book, Legal Secrets, won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association.

Professor Scheppele taught for many years in the political science department at the University of Michigan before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was the founding co-director of the gender studies program at Central European University, Budapest and served as the director of the Program in Law and Public Affairs at Princeton. She has been a visiting professor of law at Humboldt University, Berlin and Erasmus University, Rotterdam as well as at both Yale and Harvard Law Schools.

The Jackson Lecture at Chautauqua Institution is a leading annual consideration of the Supreme Court of the United States, occurring in the weeks following the completion of the Court’s annual Term. Justice Robert H. Jackson, who served on the Court from 1941-1954, was a lifelong Chautauqua Institution attendee and one of its prominent lecturers. He lived and practiced law for twenty years in Jamestown, New York, which is located on Chautauqua Lake near Chautauqua Institution and is the site of the Robert H. Jackson Center.

**For information on attending Kim Lane Scheppele’s Jackson Lecture on August 11, click here**: https://www.chq.org/event/the-21st-annual-robert-h-jackson-lecture-on-the-supreme-court-of-the-united-states-kim-lane-scheppele/. Attending the lecture requires a Chautauqua Institution gate pass. Please allow sufficient time for parking and entering the grounds.

Chautauqua’s twenty Jackson Lecturers have been:

• 2005: Geoffrey R. Stone, University of Chicago professor;
• 2006: Linda Greenhouse, New York Times writer and Yale Law School lecturer;
• 2007: Seth P. Waxman, WilmerHale partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2008: Jeffrey Toobin, legal writer and book author;
• 2009: Paul D. Clement, Clement & Murphy PLLC partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2010: Jeff Shesol, historian, communications strategist, and former White House speechwriter;
• 2011: Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate and Amicus podcast host;
• 2012: Pamela Karlan, Stanford University professor;
• 2013: Charles Fried, Harvard University professor and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2014: Akhil Reed Amar, Yale University professor;
• 2015: Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard University professor;
• 2016: Tracey L. Meares, Yale University professor;
• 2017: Judge Jon O. Newman, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit;
• 2018: Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, of the Supreme Court of Canada;
• 2019: Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP partner and former Solicitor General of the United States;
• 2020 (online): Ruth Marcus, Washington Post associate editor and columnist;
• 2021 (online): Melissa Murray, New York University professor and Strict Scrutiny podcast co-host;
• 2022: Reva Siegel, Yale University professor;
• 2023: Justin Driver, Yale University professor; and
• 2024: Kate Shaw, University of Pennsylvania professor and Strict Scrutiny podcast co-host.

For video of 2005-2017 Jackson Lectures and interviews with the lecturers during their visits to Chautauqua Institution, click here: https://accesschautauquacountytv.org/shows/robertHJacksonCenterChautauquaLectures

For video of more recent Jackson lecturers, click the links below:

• Justice Abella (2018):
  • Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtU7v2j0xqI
  • Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrEcsVs9b3g
• Donald Verrilli (2019):
  • Lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5ZFcma7HCE
  • Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itFkYkUhMuE
• Ruth Marcus (2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vJvKWNZJaw
• Melissa Murray (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8BgAyloSmQ
• Reva Siegel (2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWRJiC5L744
• Justin Driver (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrXvXIC6pwo
• Kate Shaw (2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=KwtC3Si43QI.