The Harlem News

When I Was Twenty One
By Joseph Kaye

At 21: Supreme Court Justice Van Devanter Was a Librarian.

At the age of twenty-one my position in life was that of a student in law and, as a side effort, I held the post of assistant librarian in the law library. As to my ambition at that time it was to secure a good foundation for becoming a useful lawyer.—Willis Van Devanter.

TODAY:—Mr. Van Devanter is associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, the inner shrine of the law, entrance to which is the highest award the country can bestow in recognition of supreme talent in jurisprudence.

The justice is sixty-seven years old. At the age of twenty-two he had already received his degree of LL. B. and began to practice law in Marion, Ind. When only twenty-seven he was appointed a commissioner to revise the Statutes of Wyoming and at thirty he became chief justice of the Supreme Court of that state. To be chief justice at this comparatively youthful age is a record achieved by very few jurists in the world.

Justice Van Devanter's progress continued in the order in which it had started: he became in turn assistant United States attorney, United States circuit judge and then associate justice of the Supreme Court.