mocks the squabbling that abounded on the Supreme Court during Rutledge's tenure. Rutledge served as an
associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1943 until his death in 1949. He found it challenging to write opinions, and his writing style has been criticized as unnecessarily prolix and difficult to read. His approach to the law strongly emphasized the preservation of civil liberties, Rutledge voted more often than any of his colleagues in favor of individuals who brought suit against the government, His views particularly overlapped with those of Murphy, with whom he agreed in nearly seventy-five percent of the Court's non-unanimous cases. Rutledge's arrival the subsequent year gave that case's erstwhile dissenters a majority; in
Murdock v. Pennsylvania, they overruled
Jones and struck down the tax as unconstitutional. In that landmark decision, the Court reversed its previous holding in
Minersville School District v. Gobitis, ruling instead that the First Amendment forbade public schools from requiring students to recite the
Pledge of Allegiance. Writing for a 6–3 majority that included Rutledge, Justice Jackson wrote that: "[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein". According to the jurist and scholar
John M. Ferren, Rutledge, by his vote in
Barnette, "established himself early as a concerned protector of religious freedom". Writing for the majority, Justice Black concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment
incorporated the Establishment Clause, meaning that it applied to the states as well as to the federal government. Concurring separately, he argued for a broader definition of due process, decrying the Court's willingness to permit "selective departure[s]" from the "scheme of ordered personal liberty established by the Bill of Rights" in other cases. Rutledge dissented, concluding that the court in the District of Columbia had
jurisdiction because the person having custody over the prisoners—the
Attorney General—was located there. He dissented in
Adamson v. California, in which the Court, by a vote of 5–4, held that the Fifth Amendment's protection against forced
self-incrimination did not apply to the states.
Wartime cases In re Yamashita In the 1946 case of
In re Yamashita, Rutledge rendered an opinion that was later characterized by Ferren as "one of the Court's truly great, and influential, dissents". Since the United States had not yet signed a peace treaty with Japan, he maintained that the
Articles of War permitted military trials to be conducted without complying with the Constitution's due process requirements. Rutledge wrote privately that he felt the case would "outrank
Dred Scott in the annals of the Court". In his dissent, he rejected the majority's holding that the Fifth Amendment was inapplicable, writing that: "[n]ot heretofore has it been held that any human being is beyond its universally protecting spread in the guaranty of a fair trial in the most fundamental sense. That door is dangerous to open. I will have no part in opening it. For once it is ajar, even for enemy belligerents, it can be pushed back wider for others, perhaps ultimately for all." In closing, he quoted the words of
Thomas Paine: "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." The Supreme Court, with the agreement of Rutledge, conferred its imprimatur on this decision in the cases of
Hirabayashi v. United States and
Korematsu v. United States. Green also argues that the modern condemnation of the Court's decision benefits substantially from hindsight: after the
attack on Pearl Harbor, the threat of sabotage appeared serious, and the government had hidden information that would have raised doubts about the accuracy of its assessments. His dissent in
Goesaert v. Cleary, according to Ferren, constituted "the first modern gender discrimination opinion". Writing that the Equal Protection Clause "require[s] lawmakers to refrain from invidious distinctions of the sort drawn by the statute challenged in this case", Rutledge maintained that Michigan's law was arbitrary and irrational. Writing for the Court in
Bob-Lo Excursion Co. v. Michigan, he ruled against a ferry company that had been charged with violating a Michigan civil rights law by refusing to serve African-Americans. In a narrow ruling, Rutledge held that, although Michigan was technically regulating foreign commerce, the statute imposed no serious burden on it because the island was for all practical purposes a part of Detroit. The case exemplified his flexible approach to the Commerce Clause. In
Prudential Insurance Co. v. Benjamin, Rutledge's opinion for the Court upheld a South Carolina tax on out-of-state insurers against a Commerce Clause challenge. The
McCarran–Ferguson Act, passed by Congress in 1945, had authorized state regulation of the insurance market; Rutledge concluded that the act permissibly allowed South Carolina to discriminate against interstate commerce—something it otherwise lacked the power to do. His conclusion that Congress could consent to state regulations of interstate commerce demonstrated his support for what one scholar called "flexibility in the operations of the federal system". ==Personal life and death==