The events of 2016 included, sadly, departures of special friends. The five who are highlighted here were connected directly to the life, work, and major legacies of Justice Robert H. Jackson. These people had great smarts, class, and charm. Their lives were filled with selfless accomplishments. Luckily, they have left us with powerful examples, including in various filmed moments. They were:
- Judith S. Kaye, Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, Chief Judge of the State of New York, and a member of the Robert H. Jackson Center board—click here for Chief Judge Kaye, in 2001, speaking at Chautauqua Institution;
- Bennett Boskey, a law clerk to, successively, Judge Learned Hand, Justice Stanley Reed, and Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, and later a leading Washington, D.C., lawyer and legal profession giant, including in the councils of the American Law Institute—click here for Boskey, in 2006, on Stone;
- Phil Neal, Justice Jackson’s law clerk during 1943-45 and, later, a law professor at Stanford University, law school dean at the University of Chicago, and a leading Chicago lawyer—click here for Neal, in 2002, on Jackson;
- Gwendoline Heron Niebergall, a native of the United Kingdom, whose post-World War II work took her to Nuremberg, to service on Justice Jackson’s Office of Chief of Counsel prosecution staff there, and to, among other things, presence in the center of one of history’s famous photographs—click here for Niebergall, in 2010, on Nuremberg; and
- Barrett Prettyman, Jr., Justice Jackson’s law clerk at the Supreme Court of the United States during 1953-54—Jackson’s final law clerk—and, later, a leading lawyer in Washington, a premier advocate before the Supreme Court, and a Jackson Center board member—click here for Prettyman, in 2012, on his heroes.
Memories of these people are treasures, for the year ahead and much, much longer.
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This post was emailed to the Jackson List, a private but entirely non-selective email list that reaches many thousands of subscribers around the world. I write to it periodically about Justice Robert H. Jackson, the Supreme Court, Nuremberg and related topics. The Jackson List archive site is http://thejacksonlist.com/. To subscribe, email me at barrettj@stjohns.edu. Thank you for your interest, and for spreading the word.