Black, Hugo L.

Hugo LaFayette Black (1886–1971) was a politician who represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate as a member of the Democratic Party (1927–1937) and later served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1937–1971) for more than thirty years. Prior to his nomination and appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Black practiced law, having established his own legal practice in Alabama. His only judicial experience prior to joining the Supreme Court was as a police court judge in the City of Birmingham, Alabama (1911–1912), although he did serve for three years as the Jefferson County prosecuting attorney until his resignation in order to serve in the U.S. Army in World War I. As an Alabama politician, Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but on the Supreme Court, he consistently voted with the Court's racial desegregation decisions.

Hugo Black was not only one of the longest-serving but also one of the most influential Supreme Court justices of the twentieth century. Black is most remembered for his adherence to a literal and historical approach in the reading of the U.S. Constitution—believing that the word of the Constitution actually restricted the role of the judiciary and that any changes and interpretations to the literal word of the Constitution were not at the discretion of judges but should be by the will of the people, via their elected representatives.

He was often critical of what he viewed as the “judicial legislation-making” opinions held by the more liberal members of the Court.

Black was perhaps the Court's strongest advocate of the view, which he outlined in dissent in Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46 (1947), that the Fourteenth Amendment had applied all of the provisions in the federal Bill of Rights to the states. Although Black gave one of the most expansive readings of the First Amendment (frequently arguing that the words “Congress shall make no law,” meant precisely that), he read Fourth Amendment rights more restrictively and did not believe (absent legislation requiring it) that that amendment necessarily required application of the exclusionary rule. Nor did he believe it was the responsibility of justices to update the Constitution in this respect.

In Wolf v. Colorado (1949), Black concurred in the opinion that ruled that the Fourth Amendment, albeit not the exclusionary rule to enforce the amendment, applied to the states. Although Black did agree with the decision in Mapp v. Ohio (1961), in which the Court agreed to apply the exclusionary rule to state as well as federal investigations, he was still not persuaded by the idea that in its historical and literal reading, the Fourth Amendment barred the introduction of unlawfully gained evidence. Once the exclusionary rule was applied to the states, Black fairly consistently interpreted it quite narrowly.

Justice Black demonstrated his literal and historical leanings in constitutional interpretation further in his dissenting opinion in Katz v. United States (1967). Here, Black argued that the Fourth Amendment should be interpreted literally and applied only to physical searches and seizures; thus, it did not prohibit the use of intercepted telephone conversations as evidence, as in the case of Katz. If the people wanted protection against such surveillance, he thought it was up to them to adopt a constitutional amendment on the subject rather than for the Court to seek to update the Constitution in this respect.

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