Fortas, Abe

Abe Fortas was born in 1910 in Memphis, Tennessee, to a working-class Orthodox Jewish family. He was educated in Memphis's public schools, and became well known locally playing the violin in a number of bands. He left high school early and enrolled at Southwestern College at Memphis, a school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, from which he graduated first in his class in 1930. A leading Memphis family in the Jewish community, with connections to the Yale Law School, provided Fortas with a scholarship to that institution. He received his LL.B. degree in 1933, graduating near the top of his class and having been elected editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Immediately upon graduating, Fortas was invited to take a position as a teaching fellow at the Yale Law School, and was eventually appointed assistant professor of law in 1936. He held this position until 1938, teaching courses in business law and corporate finance, often working alongside his mentors and colleagues, including then Sterling Professor of Law William O. Douglas, and future law partner Thurman Arnold. At the same time that Fortas was teaching, he had a small legal and consulting practice in New Haven.

Fortas was at the Yale Law School during the early, powerful years of the school of thought known as "legal realism," and is generally considered a legal realist in his legal, judicial, and political philosophies. In addition to his teaching and law practice, from 1933 to 1938 Fortas found himself at the center of New Deal activities in Washington, and served in a series of positions at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Works Administration, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Fortas often took leaves of absence from teaching at Yale to devote himself to government service and was considered one of the Roosevelt administration's leading and most promising young figures. In 1935, he married Carolyn Eugenia Agger, another young New Dealer, who had also been his student at the Yale Law School.

...