Owen J(osephus) Roberts

Judge, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He gained prominence when President Calvin Coolidge appointed him to prosecute in the Teapot Dome oil scandal (1924). President Herbert Hoover named him to the US Supreme Court (1930–45). On retiring from the court he became dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1948–51).

Owen Josephus Roberts (May 2, 1875 – May 17, 1955) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court for fifteen years.

He was born in Philadelphia and attended Germantown Academy and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded a law degree in 1895.

He was appointed to the Supreme Court by Herbert Hoover after Hoover's nomination of John J.

On the Court, Roberts was a swing vote between those, led by Justices Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Harlan Fiske Stone, as well as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who would allow a broader interpretation of the Commerce Clause to allow Congress to pass New Deal legislation that would provide for a more active federal role in the national economy, and the Four Horsemen (Justices James Clark McReynolds, Pierce Butler, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter) who favored a narrower interpretation of the Commerce Clause and believed that the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause protected a strong "liberty of contract." Butler, Roberts sided with the Four Horsemen and wrote an opinion striking down the Agricultural Adjustment Act as beyond Congress's Commerce powers. Roberts switched his position on the constitutionality of the New Deal in late 1936, and the Supreme Court handed down West Coast Hotel v. Since President Roosevelt's plan to appoint several new justices as part of his "Court-packing" plan of 1937 coincided with the Court's favorable decision in Parrish, many people called Roberts's vote in that case the "switch in time that saved nine."

Roberts was appointed by Roosevelt to head the commission investigating the attack on Pearl Harbor; Perhaps influenced by his work on the Pearl Harbor commission, Roberts dissented from the Court's decision upholding internment of Japanese-Americans along the West Coast in 1944's Korematsu v.

In his later years on the bench, Roberts was the only Justice on the Supreme Court not appointed by President Franklin D. Roberts resigned from the Court in 1945;

He later served as the Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

He died at his Pennsylvania farm after a four month illness.

His name was adopted as the name of a school district in Pottstown, Pennsylvania.