Home > West's Encyclopedia of American Law > Jackson, Howell Edmunds

Howell Edmunds Jackson was a U.S. senator, federal judge on the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and U.S. Supreme Court justice. Jackson toiled diligently without fanfare for many years before garnering widespread attention for the last case he heard while sitting on the Supreme Court, POLLOCK V. FARMERS' LOAN & TRUST CO., 158 U.S. 601, 15 S. Ct. 912, 39 L. Ed. 1108 (1895).

Jackson was born April 8, 1832, in Paris, Tennessee. He graduated from West Tennessee College in 1849, then studied for a time at the University of Virginia. He read the law with a Tennessee Supreme Court judge for a year, and

obtained his law degree from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1856. Thereafter, he practiced law in Jackson and Memphis. Although Jackson opposed Tennessee's secession in the Civil War, he served the Confederacy as a...