A recent article by Stephanie L. Slater (’90), law clerk for Tennessee Court of Appeals Judge John McClarty, published in the United States Supreme Court Historical Society’s Journal of Supreme Court History, offers a rare look into the life of Justice Edward T. Sanford.
Sanford, who served as an associate justice on the US Supreme Court from 1923 until his death in 1930, was a former University of Tennessee College of Law lecturer and the only known Knoxvillian and UT graduate to ever serve on the court.
Slater’s article is a chapter excerpted from a book she is authoring, Emerging from Obscurity: Edward Terry Sanford, Tennessean on the United States Supreme Court, which will be published by the University of Tennessee Press in the summer of 2017.
In an interview with the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, Slater said she was inspired to research Sanford’s life because of a portrait of the justice hanging in the courtroom.
“It amazed me that he was relatively unknown. I started researching him. My materials kept growing,” said Slater.