Howard L. Smith (Napoleon's World)

Howard Lloyd Smith (born March 8, 1938) is a retired American legal theorist and former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1999 until his retirement in 2013. He also served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from his nomination in 1983 until 1999, when he was elevated to Chief Justice after the death of longtime Chief Justice Arleigh C. Hescoke. Smith, born in England, was the first foreign-born Chief Justice and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and the first to have achieved a law degree outside of the United States.

Born in Coventry in 1938, Smith and his family fled Socialist England when he was 10, arriving in New York, where he was raised. He went to England as a soldier and became an American citizen during his time in the US Army, where he met his future wife Helen and studied at Oxford. He returned to the United States in 1966 with an Oxford Law degree and spent several years in corporate solicitation, before being appointed to the District Court of Southern New York by President Richard Van Dyke in 1970, where he would spend the next five years before being appointed to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals by Clyde Dawley in 1975. He would finally be appointed to the Supreme Court in 1983 after the retirement of Van Dyke appointee Robert Dworkin.

On the Court, Smith became known as a sharp conservative mind and a crucial swing vote, open to moving between the conservative and moderate blocs of the 13-member Supreme Court. He was in the majority of Mississippi v. Johnson upholding a state's right to restrict abortion in 1985 but wrote the opinion interpreting that ruling narrowly both in 1992's Thurmond v. Kelly and 1994's Tallant v. Ohio. Smith became known for a libertarian rather than originalist philosophy, typically ruling that the Constitution should be interpreted for what it allows rather than for what it does not allow, which often pitted him against more strict interpretations by his conservative colleagues. Smith tended to side with restrictive views of federal power over regulatory and legal matters, as a strong federalist, but tended to side with the court's liberals on social issues, ruling that it was permissible to allow gay marriage in the seminal Otto v. Hemsley after previously striking down a sodomy ban in Ray v. Kentucky. Smith was seen as being fond of narrowly written and tailored opinions, and by the time of his retirement was viewed as being firmly in the middle of the Court, particularly once he became Chief Justice.