Stanley Forman Reed (December 31, 1884 – April 2, 1980) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1938 to 1957.

After the retirement of Associate Justice George Sutherland, President Franklin D. Roosevelt successfully nominated Reed to the Supreme Court.

Reed wrote the majority opinion in cases such as Smith v. Allwright, Gorin v. United States, and Adamson v. California.

The Reeds and Formans traced their history to the earliest colonial period in America, and these family heritages were impressed upon young Stanley at an early age.

[9][2] When the war ended in 1918, Reed returned to his private law practice and became a well-known corporate attorney.

He represented the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and the Kentucky Burley Tobacco Growers Association, among other large corporations.

[10][11] The crash of the stock market in late October 1929 led the Federal Farm Board's general counsel to resign.

Although Reed was a Democrat, his reputation as a corporate agricultural lawyer led President Hoover to appoint him the new general counsel of the Federal Farm Board on November 7, 1929.

Since 1930, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Eugene Meyer, had pressed Hoover to take a more active approach to ameliorating the Great Depression.

Hoover feared both political attacks from Republicans and that publicity about which corporations were receiving RFC assistance might disrupt the agency's attempts to keep companies financially viable.

Reed mentored and protected the careers of a number of young lawyers at RFC, many of whom became highly influential in the Roosevelt administration: Alger Hiss, Robert H. Jackson, Thomas Gardiner Corcoran, Charles Edward Wyzanski Jr. (later an important federal district court judge), and David Cushman Coyle.

In a series of moves,[16] Roosevelt took the nation off the gold standard in March and April 1933, causing the dollar's value to sink.

President Roosevelt asked the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to buy gold above the market price to further devalue the dollar.

The additional deflation helped stabilize the economy during a critical period where bank runs were common.

United States Attorney General Homer Stille Cummings asked Reed to join him in writing the government's brief for the Court and assisting him during oral argument.

Finally, on February 18, 1935, the Supreme Court held in Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 294 U.S. 240 (1935), that the government had the power to abrogate private contracts but not public ones.

[15][17][18] Reed's invaluable assistance in defending the federal government's interests in "the Gold Clause Cases" led Roosevelt to appoint him Solicitor General.

Several major challenges to the National Industrial Recovery Act—considered the cornerstone of the New Deal—were reaching the Supreme Court, and Reed was forced to drop the appeals because the Office of the Solicitor General was unprepared to argue them.

[citation needed] Reed worked quickly to restore order, and subsequent briefs were noted for their strong legal argument and extensive research.

The press of appeals was so great that Reed argued six major cases before the Supreme Court in two weeks.

By the end of 1937, Reed was winning most of his economic cases and had a reputation as being one of the strongest Solicitors General since the creation of the office in 1870.

However, the two had significantly different writing styles, as Frankfurter offered lengthy, professorial discussions of the law, whereas Reed wrote terse opinions keeping to the facts of the case.

Although Reed ethically objected to having a sitting Associate Justice of the Supreme Court testify in a legal proceeding, he agreed to do so once he was subpoenaed.

Initially, his dissents "were only when, with Hughes, Brandeis, Stone or Roberts—like himself, lawyers of deep experience—he could not go along with what he considered the judge-made amendments of the Constitution implicit in the opinions of Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas and Frank Murphy, whom Roosevelt had sent to follow Black and Reed on the court.

In November 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Reed to chair the newly formed United States Commission on Civil Rights.

But some media reports indicated that his appointment would have been opposed by civil rights activists, who felt Reed was not sufficiently progressive.

For several years, he served as a temporary judge on a number of lower federal courts, particularly in the District of Columbia.

[7][39] In 1958 he was elected as a hereditary member of the New Jersey Society of the Cincinnati by right of his descent from Colonel David Forman.

An extensive collection of Reed's personal and official papers, including his Supreme Court files, is archived at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where they are open for research.