Robert H. Jackson & the Justice Jackson Lecture Series

Robert Houghwout Jackson was born in 1892 on the same farm as his father and grandfather in Spring Creek, Pennsylvania. He never attended college but went to Albany Law School for one year. He obtained most of his legal education under the old apprenticeship system as a law clerk and did not acquire a law degree until after he was named a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was awarded an honorary degree by Albany Law School.

Justice Jackson was invited by President Franklin Roosevelt to serve in the New Deal government, first as general counsel to the Bureau of Internal Revenue, later as solicitor general and attorney general. He took his seat as a justice of the Supreme Court on Oct. 6, 1941, and served until his death in 1954.

Justice Jackson is best remembered for his wisdom, vigorous decisions, and for his role as America’s chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg War Trials.

The decision to honor Justice Jackson with this lecture series was made by his friend and Supreme Court colleague Justice Tom C. Clark, one of the founders of The National Judicial College.

Sponsored by Thomson Reuters.

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Bryan A. Garner, the legal scholar and lexicographer, has written more than two dozen books about English usage and style, including Garner’s Modern English Usage (5th ed. 2022). He also cowrote two books with Justice Antonin Scalia: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (2008) and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (2012). Since the mid-1990s, Garner has been the chief editor of Black’s Law Dictionary—and has fully revamped the great dictionary over the past six unabridged editions. As founder and president of LawProse Inc., for the past 35 years he has been the most prolific teacher of CLE programs in the United States: he has taught more than 250,000 lawyers and judges.

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