ROBERTS, OWEN (JOSEPHUS)

born May 2, 1875, Philadelphia died May 17, 1955, Chester Springs, Pa., U.S. associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (193045). Upon graduating from law school, Roberts taught law at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, but by 1918 he had to devote his full time to his practice. While he was still teaching, Roberts had served as assistant district attorney and as special deputy attorney during World War I. In 1924 Pres. Calvin Coolidge named him as one of the two attorneys to prosecute parties named in the Teapot Dome scandal. After a methodical investigation, former Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall was convicted in 1929. The following year Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Herbert Hoover. Although inclined to conservatism, Roberts voted independently, and by 1931 he and the new Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes were characterized as unreliable members of the so-called liberal majority. Roberts cast the deciding vote on several New Deal programs, upholding some of them. His most important contributions to the court were in the area of civil liberties. In the most famous decision that he wrote, Herndon v. Lowry, Roberts set aside the conviction of a black communist organizer convicted under a law that provided no clear standard of guilt. In Nebbia v. New York (1934) Roberts' opinion upheld the price-setting activities of the New York State Milk Control Board and provided a legal foundation for government regulation of business affected with a public interest, setting aside the narrow interpretation made famous by Justice James C. McReynolds in Munn v. Illinois (1877). Roberts was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to head a commission investigating the bombing of Pearl Harbor; the following year it issued a report highly critical of the military.