Times Observer photo by Josh Cotton Matthew Steilen, a University of Buffalo law professor, discussed how a 1952 concurring opinion by Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson - born in Spring Creek 130 days ago - has shaped the limits of presidential power during a Jackson Day lecture held on Wednesday night at the Warren County Courthouse.

Robert H. Jackson’s role in shaping the limits of presidential power were the focus of Jackson Day in Warren this week.

Born on Feb. 13, 1892, at a family homestead in Spring Creek, Jackson rose from humble beginnings to serve in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and then as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

He was also tasked by President Harry Truman to be chief prosecutor for the United States at Nuremberg, the tribunal established to prosecute Nazi war criminals after the Second World War.

2022 marks his 130th birthday.

The Robert H. Jackson Center brought Matthew Steilen, a professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law, to the Warren County Courthouse to discuss President Harry Truman’s 1952 steel mill seizure and the role of Jackson’s concurrent opinion in shaping the limits of presidential authority both then and over the last 70 years.

Robert H. Jackson

“This opinion is a great opinion for studying the afterlife of a case,” he said, identifying the afterlife as conclusions drawn from an opinion from people other than the court.

To set the scene, the nation was in the midst of the Korean War. The nation’s steelworkers and their employers were locked in a protracted labor disagreement that put the nation’s steelworkers on the brink of a strike. To ensure production of war material, Truman seized the mills to ensure their operation.

Steilen said the move was not without precedent – President Roosevelt had done something similar during World War II – and that Jackson argued in favor of that action, suggesting that Communists had infiltrated the laborers and were trying to scuttle negotiations.

The decision in 1952, though, was wildly unpopular.

“There was a huge backlash,” Steilen said. “The public was instantly critical of it. The public didn’t see the emergency Truman and his advisors saw… There was no broad public sense that there was a shortage of steel.”

What the public thought, though, was that Truman had ignored regulations for addressing legal disputes but, more importantly, had confiscated private property.

What we now know as separation of powers was a term, Steilen said, didn’t exist then.

“One of the reasons we have so many opinions in this case, the judges were trying to craft a separation of powers doctrine that did not exist,” he explained.

The justices broke into two major schools of thought and he said Jackson was “much more willing to give us a general theory. His general theory is not limited to the particular case before the court.”

Steilen said Jackson argued that “the point is to have a government that works” which means there are often times when the legislature hands the presidency the effective power to make law. He described the relationship between the Congress and Presidency as “autonomous but reciprocal. That’s Jackson.”

Jackson’s opinion, he explained, brought such action into three categories: Congress acts which authorizes the president to act and the courts should defer to that action; Congress is silent which incited the president to take initiative; Congress acts first and prohibits what the president does. “Then it’s the court’s job to scrutinize what the president has done quite carefully.

“This is Jackson’s theory,” Steilen said. “This is not based in the case” and some argued he wasn’t entitled to project the theory.

He said the court’s decision to state Truman didn’t have the authority to steal the mills was “immensely popular. Part of it had to do with what the public was perceiving at issue,” which was the issue of taking private property. “It was popular to tell the president he had to follow the law.”

But the thinking laid out in the opinions would go on to impact future battles between Congress and the White House.

Steilen said that Congress quoted Jackson’s opinion in challenging Nixon’s power to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia and then again during the Watergate crisis. It came up again when the court held up a decision by President Carter in his attempts to free the hostages.

He noted that Jackson had argued in favor of packing the Supreme Court in the 1930s by arguing that the Supreme Court was out of touch with the American people and suggested that argument, to some degree, fueled the thinking in the opinion in the steel seizure case.

The key conclusion, though, is that the words Jackson penned in the 1950s haven’t stayed in the 1950s.

“They’re our words,” Steilen said. “They get repeated” and incorporated into future decisions. “They become ours, which is popular authority.”