Block, Upload, Automoderated users, edit, move, protect, rollback
57,799
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Created page with "{{Infobox officeholder | name=John Baptiste Fournet | birth_date=July 27, 1895 | birth_place=St. Martinville, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, USA | dea..."
{{Infobox officeholder
| name=John Baptiste Fournet
| birth_date=July 27, 1895
| birth_place=St. Martinville, St. Martin Parish, [[Louisiana]], [[United States|USA]]
| death_date=June 3, 1984 (aged 88)
| death_place=[[Jackson, Mississippi|Jackson]], Hinds County<br> [[Mississippi]]
| resting_place=Fournet Cemetery in St. Martinville, Louisiana
| office=[[Louisiana]] State Representative for St. Martin Parish
| term_star=1928
| term_end=1932
| preceded=J. H. Heinen
| succeeded=John T. Hood
| office2=[[Speaker]] of the Louisiana House of Representatives
| term_start2=1928
| term_end2=1932
| preceded2=William Clark Hughes
| succeeded2=[[Allen J. Ellender]]
| office3=35th Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana
| term_start3=1932
| term_end3=1935
| governor3=Oscar Kelly Allen
| preceded3=Alvin O. King
| succeeded3=Thomas C. Wingate
| office4= Associate Justice, Louisiana Supreme Court
| term_start4 1935
| term_end4=1949
| office5=Chief Justice, Louisiana Supreme Court
| term_start5=1949
| term_end5=1970
| party=[[Democratic Party|Democrac]]
| occupation=[[Attorney]], [[Educator]]
| spouse=(1) Rose M. Dupuis Fornet (married 1921, divorced)<br>
Two children<br>
(2) Sylva Ann Fournet<br>
'''Parents''':<br>
Louis Michel and Marcelite Gauthier Fournet}
'''John Baptiste Fournet''' (July 27, 1895 – June 3, 1984) was a [[Louisiana]] state representative and House [[Speaker]], lieutenant governor]] (1932–1935), and associate justice (1935–1949) and Chief Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court (1949–1970). He was an original backer of [[Governor]] and [[United States Senator]] [[Huey Long|Huey Pierce Long, Jr.]]
==Background==
Fournet was the oldest of ten children born to Louis Michel Fournet, a wealthy [[sugar]] planter, and the former Marcelite Gauthier in Martinsville] in St. Martin Parish in south Louisiana. He attended public schools in St. Martin Parish, and in 1913, he became a [[teacher]] in a one-room [[rural]] schoolhouse in southwestern Louisiana. In 1915, he graduated with honors from [[Northwestern State University]] (then Louisiana State [[Normal school|Normal]] College) in [[Natchitoches, Louisiana|Natchitoches]] and returned to his teaching career. He taught in Vernon, Jefferson Davis, and Pointe Coupee parishes. At the age of twenty, he was already the principal of Morganza High School in the [[village]] of Morganza in Pointe Coupee Parish.
During [[World War I]], Fournet was a private in the [[United States Army]] at Camp Martin in Louisiana and then Camp Hancock in [[Georgia]] but was not assigned outside the country.
In 1920, he received his law degree from [[Louisiana State University]] Law School in [[Baton Rouge]]. He was president of his law school class and excelled in [[football]] while at LSU. After graduation, he returned to St. Martinville to practice law. There on February 1, 1921, he married his first wife, the former Rose M. Dupuis of Breaux Bridge, with whom he had two children. They were subsequently divorced. He later practiced law in Baton Rouge and then Jennings in Jefferson Davis Parish in southwestern Louisiana.
==Huey Long defender==
Fournet was elected to the state House in 1928 from Jefferson Davis Parish and though a freshman member was tapped by Huey Long as Speaker of the House. In that role, he tried to prevent the House from [[impeachment|impeaching]] Long in 1929 by recognizing a questionable call for adjournment.<ref>{{cite book|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=WRB81_IByjsC&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=John+B.+Fournet&source=bl&ots=0hCDSygLrj&sig=LFf5gLQS7D9lYaYCRHLIYt8LmcQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MA7TUZT3G8mp8AGC3oHoAg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwATge#v=onepage&q=John%20B.%20Fournet&f=false|author=Harnett Kane|title=Huey Long's Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, 1928-1940, pp. 70-71 |publisher=Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company (1941 and 1998)|accessdate=July 2, 2013}}</ref> In the dispute, Fournet particularly clashed with [[conservative]] state Representative Cecil Morgan, Sr. (1898-1999) of [[Shreveport]], one of the leaders in the impeachment of Long. Morgan and Fournet were thereafter estranged for fifty years butreconciled not long before Fournet's death.
Nevertheless, eight articles of impeachment were subsequently approved by the House but blocked by the "Round Robin" petition signed by the critical fifteen of the thirty-nine Louisiana state senators. In 1930, Long went on the floor of the Louisiana House to lobby successfully against an anti-Long effort to unseat Fournet as Speaker.
==Lieutenant governor==
Fournet was elected lieutenant governor within the [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] primary on the Long-backed ticket led by Oscar Kelly Allen(1882-1936) of Winnfield, considered a "yes-man" to Huey Long. Ironically, his chief party rival was [[Earl Long|Earl Kemp Long]], whom Huey Long refused to support. Most Long family members, however, generally rallied behind Earl Long, who would thereafter be elected lieutenant governor in the 1936 Democratic [[primary]].
Fournet's elected predecessor was Paul Narcisse Cyr (1878-1946), a [[dentist]] from Jeanerette in Iberia Parish. Long succeeded in removing his rival Cyr from the lieutenant governorship in 1931 and replacing him with[Alvin O. King, a Long loyalist from [[Lake Charles]] in Calcasieu Parish in southwestern Louisiana.
==Election to the Supreme Court==
Fournet did not complete his term as lieutenant governor because he won a [[special election]] to the [[New Orleans]]-based state Supreme Court in the fall of 1934. Long, using sound trucks, campaigned personally for Fournet. He became an associate justice on January 2, 1935, and chief justice in 1949. He retired by constitutional mandate in 1970 at the age of seventy-five. He was also a former member of the prestigious LSU Board of Supervisors.
In May 1952, Fournet administered the gubernatorial oath to the anti-Long Governor [[Robert F. Kennon]], who defeated the Long factional choice, Judge Carlos Gustve Spaht, Sr. (1906-2001) earlier that year.<ref>''Minden Herald,'' May 16, 1952, p. 1.</ref>
==Administration of justice==
On the court, Fournet abandoned partisanship and dedicated himself to improving the administration of justice. He spearheaded the reorganization of the appellate court system. When he became chief justice, the dockets of most courts in Louisiana had a heavy backlog. He created the Louisiana Judicial Council and established the position of judicial administrator to implement the work of the council. When court reorganization did not occur through a state constitutional convention, Fournet restructured the appellate court system. He used constitutional amendments that moved much of the jurisdiction of the Louisiana Supreme Court to a larger system of intermediary courts of appeal. This allowed the Supreme Court to concentrate on cases of greater importance. The additional appellate judgeships also reduced the court congestion.
During his court tenure, Fournet participated in some 17,500 cases and wrote 1,239 opinions. Of these, 1,043 were majority opinions. Of the 525 rehearings sought from his opinions, only 19 obtained a rehearing. Of those, just seven were reversed. Of his majority opinions, only forty-one were appealed to the [[United States Supreme Court]]; nine were granted, and four were reversed.
==Major Fournet cases==
Major Fournet cases included the following:
''Kennedy v. Item Company'' (1948) — [[freedom of press]] does not include the right to maliciously [[defamation|defame]] a person's reputation
''State v. Bentley'' (1951) — safeguarded [[Fifth Amendment]] protection from [[self-incrimination]]
''State v. Pete'' (1944) — upheld constitutionality of Louisiana Criminal Code
''State v. Bessar'' (1948) — defined scope and applicability of [[felony]]-[[murder]] doctrine
''State v. Hightower'' (1960) — upheld constitutionality of the [[drunk driving]] provision of the criminal code
''State v. Smith'' (1968) — reaffirmed the validity of the definition of public [[bribery]].
Fournet's decisions strengthened criminal and civil procedure in Louisiana. He introduced a simplified form of indictment in criminal matters and reduced technicalities in matters of civil procedure. In ''Voisin v. Luke'' (1966) he wrote that the procedural rules of the civil code were intended to promote the administration of justice, not to allow "entrapment . . . of a litigant" so as to discourage the accused from pursuing a trial on the merits.
In 1941, Justice Fournet wrote a scholarly decision in ''Succession of Lissa'' in which he claimed that the sources of Louisiana law date to the Twelve Tables of the Romans, the Institutes of Gaius, the [[Justinian Code]], and the [[Code Napoleon]].
==Fournet's death==
In 1953, Justice Fournet again married, this time to a cousin, Sylvia Ann Fournet. He died at the age of eighty-eight in the capital city of [[Jackson]], [[Mississippi]], where he had retired in 1978. He is interred in Fournet Cemetery in St. Martinville. His papers are in the LSU Archives.
On February 1, 2014, Fournet was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://bossierpress.com/2013/10/02/whos-famous/|title=Who's famous?, October 2, 2013|publisher=''The Bossier Press-Tribune''|accessdate=October 2, 2013}}</ref>
==References==
{{reflist}}
* "John B. Fourne,t" ''Who's Who in America," 1938.<br>
* Richard D. White, Jr., ''Kingfish,'' [[New York]]: Random House, 2006, p. 40, 67-670, 84, 100, 105, 136, 139, 141, 200, 211, 252, 263, 265, 267-268, 276, 288.<br>
* "John Baptiste Fournet," ''American National Biography,'' edited by John A. Garraty and Marc C. Carnes ([[New York]]: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 317–318.<br>
* "John B. Fournet," ''Biographies of Louisiana Judges'' (1977), p. 147–150.<br>
* ''Louisiana Reports'' 256 (1971): 5-27 (Tributes to Judge Fournet from colleagues).<br>
* T. Harry Williams, ''Huey Long: A Biography'' (1969).<br>
* Fournet obituary, ''the New Orleans Times-Picayune,'' June 4, 1984.<br>
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fournet, John B.}}
[[Category:Louisiana People]]
[[Category:Mississippi]]
[[Category:Educators]]
[[Category:Attorneys]]
[[Category:Politicians]]
[[Category:Judges]]
[[Category:Democrats]]
[[Category:[[United States Army]]
| name=John Baptiste Fournet
| birth_date=July 27, 1895
| birth_place=St. Martinville, St. Martin Parish, [[Louisiana]], [[United States|USA]]
| death_date=June 3, 1984 (aged 88)
| death_place=[[Jackson, Mississippi|Jackson]], Hinds County<br> [[Mississippi]]
| resting_place=Fournet Cemetery in St. Martinville, Louisiana
| office=[[Louisiana]] State Representative for St. Martin Parish
| term_star=1928
| term_end=1932
| preceded=J. H. Heinen
| succeeded=John T. Hood
| office2=[[Speaker]] of the Louisiana House of Representatives
| term_start2=1928
| term_end2=1932
| preceded2=William Clark Hughes
| succeeded2=[[Allen J. Ellender]]
| office3=35th Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana
| term_start3=1932
| term_end3=1935
| governor3=Oscar Kelly Allen
| preceded3=Alvin O. King
| succeeded3=Thomas C. Wingate
| office4= Associate Justice, Louisiana Supreme Court
| term_start4 1935
| term_end4=1949
| office5=Chief Justice, Louisiana Supreme Court
| term_start5=1949
| term_end5=1970
| party=[[Democratic Party|Democrac]]
| occupation=[[Attorney]], [[Educator]]
| spouse=(1) Rose M. Dupuis Fornet (married 1921, divorced)<br>
Two children<br>
(2) Sylva Ann Fournet<br>
'''Parents''':<br>
Louis Michel and Marcelite Gauthier Fournet}
'''John Baptiste Fournet''' (July 27, 1895 – June 3, 1984) was a [[Louisiana]] state representative and House [[Speaker]], lieutenant governor]] (1932–1935), and associate justice (1935–1949) and Chief Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court (1949–1970). He was an original backer of [[Governor]] and [[United States Senator]] [[Huey Long|Huey Pierce Long, Jr.]]
==Background==
Fournet was the oldest of ten children born to Louis Michel Fournet, a wealthy [[sugar]] planter, and the former Marcelite Gauthier in Martinsville] in St. Martin Parish in south Louisiana. He attended public schools in St. Martin Parish, and in 1913, he became a [[teacher]] in a one-room [[rural]] schoolhouse in southwestern Louisiana. In 1915, he graduated with honors from [[Northwestern State University]] (then Louisiana State [[Normal school|Normal]] College) in [[Natchitoches, Louisiana|Natchitoches]] and returned to his teaching career. He taught in Vernon, Jefferson Davis, and Pointe Coupee parishes. At the age of twenty, he was already the principal of Morganza High School in the [[village]] of Morganza in Pointe Coupee Parish.
During [[World War I]], Fournet was a private in the [[United States Army]] at Camp Martin in Louisiana and then Camp Hancock in [[Georgia]] but was not assigned outside the country.
In 1920, he received his law degree from [[Louisiana State University]] Law School in [[Baton Rouge]]. He was president of his law school class and excelled in [[football]] while at LSU. After graduation, he returned to St. Martinville to practice law. There on February 1, 1921, he married his first wife, the former Rose M. Dupuis of Breaux Bridge, with whom he had two children. They were subsequently divorced. He later practiced law in Baton Rouge and then Jennings in Jefferson Davis Parish in southwestern Louisiana.
==Huey Long defender==
Fournet was elected to the state House in 1928 from Jefferson Davis Parish and though a freshman member was tapped by Huey Long as Speaker of the House. In that role, he tried to prevent the House from [[impeachment|impeaching]] Long in 1929 by recognizing a questionable call for adjournment.<ref>{{cite book|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=WRB81_IByjsC&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=John+B.+Fournet&source=bl&ots=0hCDSygLrj&sig=LFf5gLQS7D9lYaYCRHLIYt8LmcQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MA7TUZT3G8mp8AGC3oHoAg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwATge#v=onepage&q=John%20B.%20Fournet&f=false|author=Harnett Kane|title=Huey Long's Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, 1928-1940, pp. 70-71 |publisher=Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company (1941 and 1998)|accessdate=July 2, 2013}}</ref> In the dispute, Fournet particularly clashed with [[conservative]] state Representative Cecil Morgan, Sr. (1898-1999) of [[Shreveport]], one of the leaders in the impeachment of Long. Morgan and Fournet were thereafter estranged for fifty years butreconciled not long before Fournet's death.
Nevertheless, eight articles of impeachment were subsequently approved by the House but blocked by the "Round Robin" petition signed by the critical fifteen of the thirty-nine Louisiana state senators. In 1930, Long went on the floor of the Louisiana House to lobby successfully against an anti-Long effort to unseat Fournet as Speaker.
==Lieutenant governor==
Fournet was elected lieutenant governor within the [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] primary on the Long-backed ticket led by Oscar Kelly Allen(1882-1936) of Winnfield, considered a "yes-man" to Huey Long. Ironically, his chief party rival was [[Earl Long|Earl Kemp Long]], whom Huey Long refused to support. Most Long family members, however, generally rallied behind Earl Long, who would thereafter be elected lieutenant governor in the 1936 Democratic [[primary]].
Fournet's elected predecessor was Paul Narcisse Cyr (1878-1946), a [[dentist]] from Jeanerette in Iberia Parish. Long succeeded in removing his rival Cyr from the lieutenant governorship in 1931 and replacing him with[Alvin O. King, a Long loyalist from [[Lake Charles]] in Calcasieu Parish in southwestern Louisiana.
==Election to the Supreme Court==
Fournet did not complete his term as lieutenant governor because he won a [[special election]] to the [[New Orleans]]-based state Supreme Court in the fall of 1934. Long, using sound trucks, campaigned personally for Fournet. He became an associate justice on January 2, 1935, and chief justice in 1949. He retired by constitutional mandate in 1970 at the age of seventy-five. He was also a former member of the prestigious LSU Board of Supervisors.
In May 1952, Fournet administered the gubernatorial oath to the anti-Long Governor [[Robert F. Kennon]], who defeated the Long factional choice, Judge Carlos Gustve Spaht, Sr. (1906-2001) earlier that year.<ref>''Minden Herald,'' May 16, 1952, p. 1.</ref>
==Administration of justice==
On the court, Fournet abandoned partisanship and dedicated himself to improving the administration of justice. He spearheaded the reorganization of the appellate court system. When he became chief justice, the dockets of most courts in Louisiana had a heavy backlog. He created the Louisiana Judicial Council and established the position of judicial administrator to implement the work of the council. When court reorganization did not occur through a state constitutional convention, Fournet restructured the appellate court system. He used constitutional amendments that moved much of the jurisdiction of the Louisiana Supreme Court to a larger system of intermediary courts of appeal. This allowed the Supreme Court to concentrate on cases of greater importance. The additional appellate judgeships also reduced the court congestion.
During his court tenure, Fournet participated in some 17,500 cases and wrote 1,239 opinions. Of these, 1,043 were majority opinions. Of the 525 rehearings sought from his opinions, only 19 obtained a rehearing. Of those, just seven were reversed. Of his majority opinions, only forty-one were appealed to the [[United States Supreme Court]]; nine were granted, and four were reversed.
==Major Fournet cases==
Major Fournet cases included the following:
''Kennedy v. Item Company'' (1948) — [[freedom of press]] does not include the right to maliciously [[defamation|defame]] a person's reputation
''State v. Bentley'' (1951) — safeguarded [[Fifth Amendment]] protection from [[self-incrimination]]
''State v. Pete'' (1944) — upheld constitutionality of Louisiana Criminal Code
''State v. Bessar'' (1948) — defined scope and applicability of [[felony]]-[[murder]] doctrine
''State v. Hightower'' (1960) — upheld constitutionality of the [[drunk driving]] provision of the criminal code
''State v. Smith'' (1968) — reaffirmed the validity of the definition of public [[bribery]].
Fournet's decisions strengthened criminal and civil procedure in Louisiana. He introduced a simplified form of indictment in criminal matters and reduced technicalities in matters of civil procedure. In ''Voisin v. Luke'' (1966) he wrote that the procedural rules of the civil code were intended to promote the administration of justice, not to allow "entrapment . . . of a litigant" so as to discourage the accused from pursuing a trial on the merits.
In 1941, Justice Fournet wrote a scholarly decision in ''Succession of Lissa'' in which he claimed that the sources of Louisiana law date to the Twelve Tables of the Romans, the Institutes of Gaius, the [[Justinian Code]], and the [[Code Napoleon]].
==Fournet's death==
In 1953, Justice Fournet again married, this time to a cousin, Sylvia Ann Fournet. He died at the age of eighty-eight in the capital city of [[Jackson]], [[Mississippi]], where he had retired in 1978. He is interred in Fournet Cemetery in St. Martinville. His papers are in the LSU Archives.
On February 1, 2014, Fournet was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://bossierpress.com/2013/10/02/whos-famous/|title=Who's famous?, October 2, 2013|publisher=''The Bossier Press-Tribune''|accessdate=October 2, 2013}}</ref>
==References==
{{reflist}}
* "John B. Fourne,t" ''Who's Who in America," 1938.<br>
* Richard D. White, Jr., ''Kingfish,'' [[New York]]: Random House, 2006, p. 40, 67-670, 84, 100, 105, 136, 139, 141, 200, 211, 252, 263, 265, 267-268, 276, 288.<br>
* "John Baptiste Fournet," ''American National Biography,'' edited by John A. Garraty and Marc C. Carnes ([[New York]]: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 317–318.<br>
* "John B. Fournet," ''Biographies of Louisiana Judges'' (1977), p. 147–150.<br>
* ''Louisiana Reports'' 256 (1971): 5-27 (Tributes to Judge Fournet from colleagues).<br>
* T. Harry Williams, ''Huey Long: A Biography'' (1969).<br>
* Fournet obituary, ''the New Orleans Times-Picayune,'' June 4, 1984.<br>
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fournet, John B.}}
[[Category:Louisiana People]]
[[Category:Mississippi]]
[[Category:Educators]]
[[Category:Attorneys]]
[[Category:Politicians]]
[[Category:Judges]]
[[Category:Democrats]]
[[Category:[[United States Army]]