Justice George Sutherland

Justice George Sutherland joined the U.S. Supreme Court on October 2, 1922, replacing Justice John Hessin Clarke. Sutherland was born on March 25, 1862 in England, but his family moved soon afterward to Utah. He graduated from Brigham Young Academy (now Brigham Young University) in 1881, and he later attended the University of Michigan Law School. Sutherland then returned to Utah and entered private practice.

His political career began in 1896, when he was elected to the Utah Senate. In 1900, Sutherland won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives by an extremely narrow margin. He would spend just two years there, choosing not to run for reelection. Instead, Sutherland was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1904 and served two six-year terms in that chamber. He introduced the legislation that would become the Nineteenth Amendment, extending the right to vote to women. Sutherland lost his reelection bid in 1916 and transitioned into private practice in Washington, D.C. He also briefly served as the President of the American Bar Association.

On September 5, 1922, President Warren Harding nominated Sutherland to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed him on the same day, and he took the judicial oath a few weeks later. Sutherland became known as one of the "Four Horsemen," a conservative bloc of Justices that also included Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, and Willis Van Devanter. They typically opposed the New Deal legislation championed by President Franklin Roosevelt, as well as similar economic regulations. Near the end of Sutherland’s tenure in the late 1930s, the Court changed course and largely abandoned this strand of legal doctrine.

Sutherland left a more lasting legacy in other areas. For example, he wrote the majority opinion in U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., which laid a foundation for broad presidential power in foreign affairs. Sutherland shaped the direction of property law in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. by upholding the authority of local governments to enact zoning ordinances. He also ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment provides criminal defendants in capital cases in state courts with a right to counsel. This marked another step toward "incorporating" the protections in the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment so that they apply to the states.

Sutherland retired from the Supreme Court on January 17, 1938 and was replaced by Justice Stanley Forman Reed. He died on July 18, 1942 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and was buried in Maryland.