Abe Fortas (born June 19, 1910, Memphis, Tenn., U.S.—died April 6, 1982, Washington, D.C.) was a lawyer and associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1965–69). Nominated to replace Earl Warren as chief justice by Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, Fortas became the first nominee for that post since 1795 to fail to win Senate approval. The following year he became the first Supreme Court justice to resign under threat of impeachment.
Fortas was the son of William Fortas, an Orthodox Jew and cabinetmaker who had immigrated to the United States from England, and Ray Berson Fortas. He graduated from Southwestern (now Rhodes) College in 1930, after which he attended Yale Law School, where he became editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal and graduated in 1933. A protégé of future Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas—who was then teaching law at Yale—he became an assistant professor of law at Yale and then became assistant director (1937), under Douglas, of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. Fortas held a number of government posts, including undersecretary of the interior and general counsel to the Public Works Administration, before entering private law practice in Washington, D.C., in 1946. The law firm that he cofounded represented the Washington interests of many of the country’s largest corporations. In 1963 Fortas successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Gideon v. Wainwright, which established the right of the accused in criminal trials to assigned counsel, regardless of ability to pay.
In July 1965, after President Johnson had persuaded Justice Arthur Goldberg to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Johnson nominated Fortas, an old and trusted friend and adviser, to the Supreme Court. He was confirmed by the Senate by voice vote on August 11. Three years later Johnson nominated Fortas to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren. Fortas generally had sided with the liberal court majority, and his nomination was quickly assailed by various critics, who also cited his continued counsel on policy to Johnson and his acceptance of $15,000 for a series of university seminars. When the nomination came to the Senate floor, a filibuster ensued. Shortly afterward, Fortas requested that his name be withdrawn from consideration, and the president complied. In 1969 Fortas’s earlier financial involvement with a financier who was subsequently imprisoned for securities violations appeared likely to precipitate impeachment proceedings in Congress; in May Fortas, declaring his innocence, resigned from the court. Subsequently he returned to private practice.