Brown, John R.

(b. 10 December 1909 in Funk, Nebraska; d. 22 January 1993 in Houston, Texas), Texas judge who practiced admiralty, maritime, and transportation law.

Brown, the son of E. E. and Elvira Brown, received an A.B. from the University of Nebraska in 1930 and a J.D. from the University of Michigan in 1932. In law school, he “studied like hell and got drunk once a month” while earning the highest grades in the school’s history. Upon graduation Brown went to Texas, settling in Houston where, despite not knowing “port from starboard or keel from truck,” he was an associate of the Royston and Rayzor law firm in 1932, becoming a junior partner in 1936 and a partner in 1939. When he left in September 1955 he was a senior active partner specializing in admiralty, maritime, and transportation law. His most important case arose from the Texas City disaster in 1947. Two ships filled with ammonium nitrate fertilizer exploded while docked, leveling much of the city and killing over 600 people. Brown was one of the lawyers who brought suit against the federal government. They won at trial but lost on an appeal that the Supreme Court eventually upheld. Congress then appropriated $16 million in claims, significantly less than the original verdict. Three years later, in 1955, the Supreme Court reversed its position on the key issue.

Brown helped build the Republican party in Texas after World War II. He was a member of the challenged delegation that supported Dwight D. Eisenhower at the 1952 convention and became Harris County (Houston) party chairman the next year. In 1955 he was nominated to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which spanned the South from Georgia to Texas. After a bumpy confirmation struggle, in which his role in the Texas City litigation was reexamined and he came close to asking President Eisenhower to withdraw his nomination, Brown took his seat that July.

“We are our brother’s keeper because God meant it that way,” Brown said during his first year as a judge. He considered himself a Lincoln Republican, and he joined with Judges Richard T. Rives, Elbert P. Tuttle, and John Minor Wisdom to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education and to translate it into a broad mandate for racial justice and equality under law. They “made as much of an imprint on American society and American law as any four judges below the Supreme Court have ever done on any court,” observed Burke Marshall, assistant attorney general in the administration of John F. Kennedy. “If it hadn’t been for judges like that on the Fifth Circuit, I think Brown would have failed in the end.”

From his first days as a judge, Brown demonstrated a talent for administration. He assisted successive chief judges in docketing, assigning judges to, and monitoring cases. “If Judge Brown is going to be the acting clerk,” a colleague acidly observed, “we need another judge.” Shortly after becoming chief judge on 17 July 1967, Brown designed and implemented summary procedures allowing judges to dispense of certain cases on the basis of the briefs alone, without oral argument. By the time of his death, sixty percent of the Fifth Circuit’s cases were decided in this way. In 1970 Brown introduced a rule authorizing the court to decide a limited number of cases without issuing an opinion. He also persuaded the United States Judicial Council, and hence Congress, to create an office of staff lawyers to screen briefs and records in most appellate cases, an innovation many other courts emulated. Brown’s predecessor as chief judge, Elbert Tuttle, called him “the premier judicial administrator of this century.”

These procedures were indispensable in the late 1960s as the Fifth Circuit had to meet the new demands of the Supreme Court in school desegregation. Thousands of school board cases were clogging the docket, and the judges had “to get the job done,” Brown said. “All that can be said about school cases has been said,” he told his colleagues. “There is no point in writing further words.” Cases were decided by opinion orders. The court had “to “ride roughshod” to complete the job of school integration in the Deep South,” he noted. The “result is in [the] figures.”

Brown considered Gomillon v. Lightfoot (1959), in which the Alabama legislature redrew city boundaries to exclude the largely black area around Tuskegee Institute, to be his most important opinion. “I had never concerned myself much with constitutional problems or issues,” he later admitted. Implicitly criticizing his colleagues as “blind” for upholding the redistricting, Brown wrote, “I make no apologies for the view that the business of judging in constitutional fields is one of searching for the spirit of the Constitution in terms of the present as well as the past, not the past alone…. When legislation oversteps its bounds … the Courts are the only haven for citizens in the minority.” The Supreme Court followed his approach.

An opinion in Brown’s view “ought not necessarily to put the reader to sleep.” A 1973 concurring opinion on the marketing of detergents certainly did not. Parodying the court’s opinion and naming twenty-three brands, Brown noted, “Clearly, the decision represents a Gamble since we risk a Cascade of criticism from an increasing Tide of ecology-minded citizens.” The writing style reflected the man: direct and decisive, but with an undeniable flair. Brown included soda pop slogans, puns, biblical references, mythology, and movie titles in opinions, and he wrote one decision as a poem. He was also a pioneer in the area of computers and the law, writing about their interface as early as 1961.

Brown’s gregariousness, perpetual quips, and vibrant, usually plaid sport coats ensured that he would not be anonymous. His colleagues called him “peppery, warm, sarcastic, charming, forceful, even pushy.” All conceded his enthusiasm and humor. Brown engaged in impromptu sing-alongs and appeared in costumes at judicial conferences, once wearing a Lone Ranger outfit complete with mask. It was a fitting disguise, for as one observer noted, Brown “was essentially a loner who masked his inner self with flamboyant style.” His first wife, Mary Lou Murray, whom he married on 30 May 1936 and with whom he had one child, disliked both his becoming a judge and the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision. After her death in 1977, Brown married Vera Smith Riley on 14 September 1979. He served as a major in the transportation corps during World War II in which he worked in the judge advocate’s department and acted as a port commander in the Philippines. He was an active Presbyterian, serving as deacon and then as elder of his church. Brown died of cancer in Houston.

Brown’s papers are at the O’Quinn Law Library of Houston University in Texas. Other sources include Frank T. Read and Lucy S. McGough, Let Them Be Judged: The Judicial Integration of the Deep South (1978); Jack Bass, Unlikely Heroes: The Dramatic Story of the Southern Judges of the Fifth Circuit Who Translated the Supreme Court’s Brown Decision into A Revolution of Equality (1981); and Harvey Couch, A History of the Fifth Circuit, 1891-1981 (1984), which discuss the Court of Appeals on the Fifth Circuit on which he served. Articles are found in Houston Law Review 34 (spring 1998); “Bench Conference” (interview with Brown), in Trial (Jan. 1984); Blake A. Bailey, “Profile: The Colorful Judge John Robert Brown,” Fifth Circ. Reporter (Sept. 1990); “Salute to the Honorable John R. Brown,” 767 F.2d lxvii (1984); “Proceedings,” 743 F.2d lxvi (1985); “In Recognition,” Tulane Law Review 54 (1980); Brown, “Electronic Brains and the Legal Mind: Computing the Data Computer’s Collision with Law,” Yale Law Journal 71 (1961). An obituary is in the New York Times (27 Jan. 1993).

Roger K. Newman