Andy Jackson & the Judge

As his valedictory before leaving New Orleans to join the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, Federal District Judge J. Skelly Wright last week had some thoughts about his native city. The man who reaped a whirlwind of local controversy when he decreed that New Orleans' public schools must be desegregated recalled the 100 unconstitutional laws that the Louisiana legislature had passed to block integration, and recalled too the cursing women who harassed the four little Negro girls trying to attend a mixed school. Judge Wright believed that New Orleans has failed to educate its people "to the social change of the 20th century." The Supreme Court must be "the final interpreter of the Constitution," he said, and the Constitution "should not be interpreted with reference to the time in which it was written but rather in reference to the present, or better still, the future." Then he recalled an incident regarding Andrew Jackson and the law during the British invasion of New Orleans in 1815. A local editor attacked General Jackson in his newspaper, and when the battle was over, Jackson put the editor in jail. The editor appealed to Federal Judge Dominick A. Hall and obtained a writ of habeas corpus. Jackson had the judge jailed too. But as soon as martial law was lifted by Jackson, Hall returned to his bench and summoned Jackson before him on a contempt citation. Jackson appeared and meekly paid a $1,000 fine.

As he left the court, Jackson was surrounded by an angry mob of citizens who were eager to avenge him. He stood up in his carriage and silenced them with an eloquent speech: "I have, during the invasion, exerted every one of my faculties for the defense and preservation of the Constitution and the laws . . . Considering obedience to the laws, even when we think them unjustly applied, is the first duty of a citizen, and I do not hesitate to comply with the sentence you have heard pronounced."

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