Justice Emmett N. Parker | Temple of Justice

Born: Thursday, May 12th, 1859

Died: Friday, December 8th, 1939

Birthplace: York, Pennsylvania

Religion: Quaker

Education: Cincinnati Law School, LL.B. (1882)

Career: Probate Judge (1882-1887)
    Municipal Court (1890-1892)
    Superior Court (1893-1897)
    Tacoma City Attorney (1900-1901)

Served: Friday, February 26th, 1909 to Tuesday, August 15th, 1933

Chief Justice: Monday, January 10th, 1921 to Monday, January 8th, 1923

Political Party: Republican

Appointing Governor: Hay (Republican)

Emmett N. Parker was born in York, Pennsylvania. His father, a miller, entered the Union Army and died shortly after the battle of Antietam, when Emmett was three. In 1863 his mother moved her family to Henry County, Iowa, to live with her brother. Emmett grew up on his uncle’s farm. The family belonged to the Society of Friends. After public schools in the county, Emmett attended Whittier College in Salem, Iowa, for two years. Leaving Whittier, he clerked in dry goods stores in Burlington and Iowa City for three years. In 1879 he went to Cincinnati to study law in the offices of U. S. Attorney Warren M. Bateman. He also attended lectures at the University of Cincinnati Law School, graduating in 1882. Admitted to practice in Ohio the same year, within a few months he moved to Kidder County in Dakota Territory (North Dakota) to practice law. In Dakota, Parker served five years as probate judge and one term as Steele City Attorney.

Opportunities in the Pacific Northwest drew Parker to Tacoma in 1888. Within a year he became attorney for the Association of Wholesale Merchants and then Tacoma’s first municipal (police) judge in 1890, serving until 1892. In 1893 he became superior court judge for Pierce County. After serving a four year term, the mayor of Tacoma appointed Parker assistant city attorney and shortly thereafter, in 1901, voters elected him city attorney. He served until 1901.

Parker had been a serious candidate for appointment to one of the two new positions on the supreme court created by the legislature in 1905. In 1908 he ran a credible but unsuccessful primary race for the high court, garnering more than 34,000 votes. In 1909 geography aided him in his quest for a court seat. Seattle’s Frank Rudkin was the court’s only west-sider. Acting Governor Marion E. Hay appointed Parker and George Morris to two newly created positions on the supreme court. In 1910 voters overwhelmingly affirmed Parker after Republicans nominated him in the last partisan convention to name judicial candidates for the supreme court. In 1916, 1922, and 1928 voters reelected Parker. In none of these elections did he have to campaign beyond the primary.

On the bench Parker tended to adopt moderate-to-liberal stances regarding, especially, government regulation and taxation. If measures threatening private property were in the public interest, they should stand. In Reclamation Board v. Clausen, for example, he wrote that a particular tax measure ought to be judged on the basis of its policy implications rather than on pure legal logic:

That such a question … has proven so vexatious is … because of its inherent nature in that, in its last analysis, it is not one of exclusive legal logic, but is one more or less of policy and wisdom, properly determinable in light of the public welfare, present and future, in a broad sense; and hence is not a pure judicial law question.

A heart ailment kept Parker from full participation on the bench during the 1933 session and he missed two important decisions dealing with the constitutionality of income and business and occupation taxes. He resigned from the bench in August of that year.

Judge Parker was a charter member of, and one of the leading forces behind, the American Law Institute. The institute’s objective was to codify the principal fields of judge-made common law into useful “restatements.” Under the institute’s auspices, Judge Parker traveled often to Washington, D. C., to consult with national leaders of the bar and became friends with U. S. Supreme Court justices and prominent attorneys. A life member, he served on the institute’s executive committee for ten years.

Parker also participated actively in the Washington State Bar Association, serving on many of its committees. He was a delegate to the American Bar Association national convention in 1895 and served on the ABA’s general council in 1923.

In 1884 Parker married Emma Garretson in Iowa City. They had four children: Anna, Theodore, Helen, and Evangeline. Judge Parker was a Thirty-second Degree Mason, an active Shriner, and a member of the Tacoma Commercial Club. Regarded as a scholar, he wrote extensively on legal subjects.

Selected References

C. S. Reinhart, The History of the Supreme Court of the Washington Territory and State (n.d.), pp. 79-80; Seattle Times, 8 Dec. 1939; H. James Boswell, American Blue Book: Western Washington (1922), p. 12.

The preceding biography is from Charles Sheldon's The Washington High Bench: A Biographical History of the State Supreme Court, 1889-1991, © 1992 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Reprinted here with permission and licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by The Temple of Justice Project.