Potter Stewart (January 23, 1915 - December 7, 1985) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court .
Stewart was born in Jackson, Michigan while his family was on vacation. His father was a prominent Republican from Cincinnati, Ohio. His father served as Mayor of Cincinnati for seven years and was later a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court.
Stewart attended the Hotchkiss School, graduating in 1933. Then, he went on to Yale University, where he graduated in 1937. Here he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and served as chairman of the student newspaper, The Yale Daily News. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1941, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He served in World War II as a member of the US Naval Reserve aboard oil tankers.
In 1943, he married Mary Ann Bertles in a ceremony at Bruton Episcopal Church in Williamsburg, Virginia. His brother, Zeph Stewart, was the Best Man. They eventually had a daughter, Harriet (Virkstis), and two sons, Potter, Jr. and David.
At the age of 39, in 1954, he was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. In 1958, President Eisenhower nominated Stewart to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Harold Hitz Burton, who was retiring. Stewart remained on the Court until his retirement in July 1981 at the age of 66.
After his retirement, he appeared in a series of public television specials about the United States Constitution with Fred W. Friendly.
Stewart retained a moderate outlook throughout his tenure on the Court, perhaps best typified by his joining the decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972) which invalidated all death penalty laws then in force, and then joining in the Court's decision four years later upholding the revised capital punishment legislation adopted in a majority of the states. Stewart dissented from the Court's decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), invalidating a law banning the sale of contraceptives, but joined the majority in the more significant case of Roe v. Wade (1973), which recognized the right to abortion.
To the lay public, Stewart may be best known for a quotation, or a fragment thereof at least, from his opinion in the obscenity case of Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). Stewart wrote in his short concurrence that obscenity was hard to define, but that "I know it when I see it[.]" Usually dropped from the quote is the remainder of that sentence, "and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."