Essay by Joel Wm. Friedman
On July 13, 1957, in the New Orleans courtroom of U.S. District Judge J. Skelly Wright, the head of the Louisiana Republican Party, and influential power broker in the national Republican Party, John Minor Wisdom, took the oath of office for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from his former law partner, Saul Stone. On that hot Saturday afternoon, Wisdom set forth on a judicial career that would span five decades and would place him in the pantheon of this country's greatest and most influential appellate jurists. The occasion of the forty-fifth anniversary of Wisdom's joining the Fifth Circuit is a fitting and proper opportunity to take advantage of hindsight in assessing the impact that one Tulane Law School graduate had on the development of American jurisprudence. And although an exhaustive review of Wisdom's entire body of work is beyond the scope of this Essay, a careful analysis of those opinions reveals that by the end of his first five years on the bench, Wisdom had already displayed all of the elements of what came to be recognized as a “Wisdom opinion”—a fundamental commitment to fairness, scrupulous attention to linguistic and historical accuracy, and the artful use of both colorful and precise language. So manifest was the technical brilliance and stylistic literacy of these first opinions that within this short span of time, Wisdom assumed a position of intellectual leadership on the court that he would never relinquish.
About the Author
Joel Wm. Friedman. Jack M. Gordon Professor of Procedural Law & Jurisdiction Law, Tulane Law School.
Citation
77 Tul. L. Rev. 915 (2003)