Reed, Stanley Forman

(1884-1980)

   Born in Kentucky, Stanley Reed studied for his B.A. at Kentucky Wesleyan College in 1902 and Yale University in 1906, where he graduated in 1908. He studied law at the University of Virginia and Columbia Law School but did not complete his program. He spent a year at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1908. Reed was admitted to the bar in Kentucky in 1910 and established a practice in Maysville that year. He served in the Kentucky General Assembly from 1912 to 1916, leaving to serve in the army in World War I. After the war, Reed worked for a law firm and was appointed general counsel to the Federal Farm Board by Herbert Hoover in 1929. In 1932, he became counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and in 1935 was appointed solicitor general. In 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Reed to the Supreme Court, where he consistently upheld New Deal measures involving federal regulation of the economy. Generally regarded as a moderate, Reed wrote the majority argument in Smith v. Allwright and later supported the decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka against segregation in schools. He retired in 1957 and became a judge in the lower courts. He was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to chair the U.S. Civil Rights Commission but declined the appointment to maintain the impartiality of the judiciary.