Charles Evans Hughes is one of only five justices in the court’s history to leave the Supreme Court to try and obtain what some (though only some) might call a better position.
Born to David Charles Hughes, an English immigrant and Baptist minister, and Mary Catherine Connelly Hughes in Glens Falls, New York, in 1862, Hughes attended Madison University (now Colgate University) before transferring to Brown University, graduating in 1881. He then attended law school at Columbia University, graduating in 1884. After passing the bar (he reportedly scored an impressive 99 ½), Hughes practiced law in New York City before teaching at Cornell Law School for two years in the 1890s during a stress-induced sabbatical from his legal practice.
Apparently somewhat recovered from his stress, Hughes moved to a more public career in the early 1900s after leading a pair of high-profile investigations (one into abuses in New York’s public utilities industry, and the other in the life insurance business). This led to a dramatic rise in his political fortune: After gaining support from President Theodore Roosevelt, Hughes ran for governor of New York and was elected in 1906 (narrowly beating William Randolph Hearst).
In 1910, President William Howard Taft nominated Hughes to the court, “in part to remove a likely challenger from the 1912 presidential election.” The Senate handily confirmed Hughes in May 1910. If Taft thought he had politically neutralized Hughes, however, he was wrong: Hughes ran for president in 1916, reportedly wanting to dispel the notion that he was a man “who placed his own comfort and preference for the life of a judge above his duty to the nation.” In this, Hughes became the first (and to date, only) sitting justice to be nominated for the presidency by a major party – though he resigned from the court after being nominated. After running a seemingly successful campaign, Hughes went to sleep on election night after being told by his advisers that he had won – only to lose California by a few thousand votes, which swung the Electoral College for Woodrow Wilson.
But Hughes’ political career was far from over. After working again in private practice, he returned to public service as Secretary of State in 1921 under President Warren Harding, where he negotiated the 1922 Five-Power Naval Limitation Treaty, designed to prevent a naval arms race between the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, and Italy. Hughes also negotiated the Treaty of Berlin, a peace treaty between the U.S. and Germany. It was during these years out of the judiciary that Hughes developed his theory of the Constitution in wartime, captured in his famous axiom, “the power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.”
In 1930, Hughes was nominated as chief justice by President Herbert Hoover to fill a seat vacated by Taft. In other words, the man who had first put Hughes on the court was now his predecessor in the center chair. Hughes’ confirmation was relatively swift but not seamless (in particular, he was accused of being too supportive of corporate interests), and the Senate eventually voted 52–26 to confirm him. (When Hughes became chief justice, his son, Charles Evans Hughes, Jr., resigned from his position as solicitor general, presumably to avoid a conflict of interest.)
On the bench, Hughes was a prolific opinion-writer; between 1930 and 1938, he wrote approximately 21 opinions each term. He was also a strategic “assigner” of opinions, doing so based on justices’ particular predilections or specialties. And Hughes certainly played the part of chief justice. As Justice Robert Jackson, a future Nuremberg prosecutor, once put it, “Hughes looked like God and talked like God.”
Some of Hughes’ most famous decisions include Near v. Minnesota in 1931, which held that the government could not prevent articles from being published except in very limited circumstances, and 1937’s NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. , which held the Wagner Act (which prohibited employers from engaging in certain unfair labor practices) to be constitutional.
But perhaps the greatest test of Hughes’ tenure came in 1937, when he navigated President Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to increase the number of justices on the court so as to fill it with sympathetic justices. During this, Hughes worked with Sen. Burton Wheeler of Montana, a Democrat who agreed to lead the opposition to the court-packing bill – and with the approval of both liberal Justice Louis Brandeis and conservative Justice Willis Van Devanter, Hughes sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee countering the president’s argument that the court needed to be made larger because of the slow pace of its decision-making (“calmly point[ing] out that the Court was keeping up with its work.”) The plan was killed in the Senate that July, and FDR grudgingly remarked that Hughes was the best politician in the nation.
Hughes retired in 1941, having held the court together through the Great Depression and FDR’s attacks on it. He died in 1948 of pneumonia and heart disease and was buried in New York City. For a man who spent much of his career in politics and the judiciary, it is perhaps fitting that one of his most notable acts was refusing to let the court’s independence be dramatically weakened by the other branches.