WISDOM, JOHN MINOR (1905–1999)

John Minor Wisdom, a patrician son of the Old South who became one of the prime architects of the progressive New South, is, along with learned hand, henry j. friendly, and Irving Kaufman, one of a select group of judges who never sat on the Supreme Court but is regarded as producing the most long-lasting and profound impact on American jurisprudence in the twentieth century. Although universally known for his learned, literate, and path-breaking opinions in the field of civil rights, among the more than 1,500 opinions Wisdom authored over the course of his forty-two years as an active and senior judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, are numerous seminal opinions in a diverse area of subjects, including trust, railroad reorganization, criminal, tax, and maritime law.

Wisdom's roots run deep in Southern soil. His mother was a descendant of the Minors of Virginia, a wealthy and socially prominent member of the landed gentry whose ancestors arrived in the state from Holland in the 1650s. The Wisdoms emigrated from England to America in 1730 and eventually settled in New Orleans in the 1840s where John Wisdom's grandfather built a successful cotton and tobacco commission business. John Wisdom's maternal grandfather, David Cohen Labatt, a leading Jewish lawyer in New Orleans and distant cousin of Judah P. Benjamin, received the first law degree conferred by the forerunner of what became Tulane Law School. Eighty-one years later, John Wisdom also received a law degree from Tulane.

A legal career, however, was not preordained for young John Wisdom. Following in his father's footsteps, John Wisdom received his undergraduate degree at Washington & Lee University. (Throughout his career, John Wisdom proudly displayed his father's certificate of scholarly achievement containing the faded signature of the college's president, Robert E. Lee.) Anticipating a career as a literary critic, John Wisdom enrolled at Harvard University in 1925, where he intended to obtain a Master of Arts, and possibly, thereafter, a doctoral degree in English. But after arriving, he learned that his lack of training in Latin or Greek precluded his participation in the program, so he stayed for only one year, choosing to audit courses at the Law School. The experience convinced him that he wanted to become a lawyer, and so he returned home to attend Tulane Law School, where he was graduated at the top of his class in 1929.

While building a highly successful law firm with a law school classmate, Wisdom turned some of his boundless energy to the field of politics. Committed to the notion that a strong two-party system was an essential element of a vibrant democracy, Wisdom committed himself to resuscitating Louisiana's long dormant republican party. With the help of his wife, the former Bonnie Mathews, and a small band of devoted followers, Wisdom built up a political machine in the state and was instrumental in securing the Republican Party presidential nomination for dwight d. eisenhower in 1952. Five years later, Eisenhower turned to Wisdom to fill a vacant spot on the Fifth Circuit, the appellate court with jurisdiction over the entire Deep South—Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. Wisdom served on that court until his death in 1999, two days shy of his ninety-fourth birthday.

Wisdom's opinions are noted for their unpretentious eloquence, comprehensive and scholarly reliance on history, philosophy, and literature, their vision, and their bedrock commitment to fairness. As the intellectual leader of a group of progressive Fifth Circuit judges derisively called "The Four," Wisdom was the author of opinions that ordered the enrollment of James Meredith into the then-segregated University of Alabama, overturned the racially discriminatory jury selection system in Orleans Parish, mandated the desegregation of all public parks and playgrounds in New Orleans, struck down Louisiana's racist voter registration law, upheld the use of voluntary, racially based affirmative action by a private employer, and held that involuntarily committed psychiatric patients had a constitutional right to adequate treatment in state mental institutions. In United States v. Jefferson County Board of Education (1966), the case Wisdom viewed as his most important opinion, he rejected the widely held view in the South that while the Constitution prohibited discrimination, it did not affirmatively require integration. He held that school boards had an affirmative duty to develop desegregation plans and advised them "the only school desegregation plan that meets constitutional standards is one that works."

Joel Wm . Friedman
(2000)

Bibliography

Bass, Jack 1981 Unlikely Heroes. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Read, Frank T. and Mc Gough, Lucy S. 1978 Let Them Be Judged. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press.

Friedman, Joel Wm. 1995 John Minor Wisdom's Battle Against the Political Bosses. Tulane Law Review 69:1439–1511.

——1996 Judge Wisdom and the 1952 Republican National Convention. Washington and Lee Law Review 53:33–97.