William Francis Murphy (April 13, 1890 – July 19, 1949) was an American politician, lawyer, and jurist from Michigan.

Murphy lost re-election to Fitzgerald in 1938 and accepted an appointment as the United States Attorney General the following year.

In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Murphy to the Supreme Court to fill a vacancy caused by the death of Pierce Butler.

He then served with the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War I,[8] achieving the rank of captain with the occupation army in Germany before leaving the service in 1919.

[8] He did his graduate work at Lincoln's Inn in London and Trinity College, Dublin, which was said to be formative for his judicial philosophy.

He developed a need to decide cases based on his more holistic notions of justice, eschewing technical legal arguments.

"[11] Murphy was appointed and took the oath of office as the first Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan on August 9, 1919.

[16] After an initial mistrial of all of the black defendants, Henry Sweet—who admitted that he fired the weapon which killed a member of the mob surrounding Dr. Sweet's home and was retried separately—was acquitted by an all-white jury on grounds of the right of self-defense.

A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists, and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Murphy ranked as the seventh-best American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993.

He was sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Filipinos, especially the land-hungry and oppressed tenant farmers, and emphasized the need for social justice.

The office was created by the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934, which provided for a period of transition from direct American rule to the complete independence of the islands on July 4, 1946.

[citation needed] Murphy was elected the 35th governor of Michigan on November 3, 1936, defeating Republican incumbent Frank Fitzgerald, and served one two-year term.

The United Automobile Workers engaged in an historic sit-down strike at General Motors' Flint plant.

After 27 people were injured in a battle between the workers and the police, including 13 strikers with gunshot wounds, Murphy sent the National Guard to protect the workers, failed to follow a court order that requested him to expel the strikers, and refused to order the Guard's troops to suppress the strike.

[29] One year after becoming attorney general, on January 4, 1940, Murphy was nominated by President Roosevelt as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, filling the vacancy caused by the death of Pierce Butler the previous November.

[1] The timing of the appointment put Murphy on the cusp of the Charles Evans Hughes[31] and the Harlan Fiske Stone courts.

[32] On the death of Chief Justice Stone, Murphy served in the court led by Frederick Moore Vinson, who was confirmed in 1946.

He has been acclaimed as a legal scholar and a champion of the common man,[39] but Justice Felix Frankfurter disparagingly nicknamed Murphy "the Saint", criticizing his decisions as being rooted more in passion than reason.

As he wrote in Falbo v. United States (1944), "The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution."

[41] Douglas, Murphy and then Rutledge were the first justices to agree with Black's notion that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights' protection in it; this view would later become law.

[42] Murphy is perhaps best known for his vehement dissent from the court's ruling in Korematsu v. United States (1944), which upheld the constitutionality of the government's internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Serving as committee chair, he declared that it was created to combat Nazi propaganda "breeding the germs of hatred against Jews."

[47] Murphy was among 12 nominated at the 1944 Democratic National Convention to serve as Roosevelt's running mate in the presidential election that year.

[49] The first committee was established in early 1944 to promote rescue of European Jews, and to combat antisemitism in the United States.

[50] Murphy died in his sleep at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit on July 19, 1949, of a coronary thrombosis at the age of 59.

Murphy's personal and official files are archived at the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and are open for research.

Ann Parker was frequently seen horseback riding with Murphy in Washington during his tenure as U.S. Attorney General, leading to speculation of a romance in the press.