John Thomas Noonan Jr. (October 24, 1926 – April 17, 2017) was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Personal and education

Born in Boston, Noonan entered Harvard University in 1944 and graduated summa cum laude two years later with a Bachelor of Arts in English. While at Harvard he wrote for the Harvard Crimson and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After a year at St. John's College, Cambridge, Noonan matriculated at Catholic University of America, from which he received a Master of Arts in 1949 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1951, both in philosophy. In 1954, he received a Bachelor of Laws from Harvard Law School, where he served on the Harvard Law Review. Noonan was married to art historian Mary Lee Noonan (née Bennett) from 1967 until his death. They had three children.

Professional

From 1954 to 1955, Noonan worked as Special Staff to the United States National Security Council, assisting Robert Cutler, then the National Security Advisor. In 1955, Noonan entered private practice, working for the Boston law firm of Herrick & Smith. From 1958 to 1962, he served as Chairman of the Brookline, Massachusetts Redevelopment Authority, after defeating Michael Dukakis in an election. In 1961, Noonan was invited to join the faculty at the Notre Dame Law School by the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh. Noonan was tenured there three years later. Noonan was appointed, largely on account of his book Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (1965), as a historical consultant to the papal commission established by Pope Paul VI, whose recommendation to relax the ban on birth control was then overruled. In 1966, Noonan moved to Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, where he became Robbins Professor of Law Emeritus. While at Berkeley, Noonan represented John Negre, a Catholic conscientious objector who insisted that the Church's just war theory forbade participation in the Vietnam War. Although Justice William O. Douglas initially ordered the Army not to ship out Negre, that stay was removed by the full U.S. Supreme Court on April 21, 1969. Noonan continued to file briefs, but, after hearing argument, the Supreme Court ruled against Negre in Gillette v. United States (1971). Noonan was the 1984 recipient of the Laetare Medal, awarded annually since 1883 by Notre Dame University in recognition of outstanding service to the Roman Catholic Church through a distinctively Catholic contribution in the recipient's profession. Noonan has served as a consultant for several agencies in the Catholic Church, including Pope Paul VI's Commission on Problems of the Family, and the U.S. Catholic Conference's committees on moral values, law and public policy, law and life issues. He also has been director of the National Right to Life Committee.

Federal judicial service

On October 16, 1985, President Ronald Reagan nominated Noonan to the newly created 27th seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, created by 98 Stat. 333. Noonan was confirmed by United States Senate on December 16, 1985, and received his commission the following day. He took senior status on December 27, 1996 and served the Court until his death in 2017.

Law clerks

Noonan's former law clerks include United States District Judge Brian Morris, former White House Chief Ethics Counsel and University of Minnesota Professor Richard Painter, California Superior Court Judge Allison M. Danner, University of Washington Professor Mary Fan, Boston College Law School Professor Cathleen Kaveny, NPR host Ailsa Chang, poet and lawyer Monica Youn, and Dean of Washington University School of Law Nancy Staudt.

Noteworthy rulings

"The First Amendment, guaranteeing the free exercise of religion to every person within the nation, is a guarantee that Townley Manufacturing Company rightly invokes. Nothing in the broad sweep of the amendment puts corporations outside its scope. Repeatedly and successfully, corporations have appealed to the protection the Religious Clauses afford or authorize. Just as a corporation enjoys the right of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, so a corporation enjoys the right guaranteed by the First Amendment to exercise religion. The First Amendment does not say that only one kind of corporation enjoys this right. The First Amendment does not say that only religious corporations or only not-for-profit corporations are protected. The First Amendment does not authorize Congress to pick and choose the persons or the entities or the organizational forms that are free to exercise their religion. All persons--and under our Constitution all corporations are persons--are free. A statute cannot subtract from their freedom."

• Id. at 623 (citations omitted) "The Black cases require us to address the limits on how our government may treat its citizens. They pose the question whether the government may target poor, minority neighborhoods and seek to tempt their residents to commit crimes that might well result in their escape from poverty. Equally important, these cases force us to consider the continued vitality of the outrageous government conduct doctrine itself. The majority opinion decides all of these issues incorrectly. Further, despite its claims to the contrary, the majority's reasoning does virtually nothing to caution the government about overreaching. Instead, it sends a dangerous signal that courts will uphold law enforcement tactics even though their threat to values of equality, fairness, and liberty is unmistakable."

Selected honors and awards

Publications

Noonan was a prolific and wide-ranging author. To quote one commentator:"[Noonan] has written a number of important studies about the interaction of Catholic moral doctrine and law, including comprehensive studies concerning contraception, marriage and divorce, and abortion. ... He has written important studies of legal and judicial ethics, judicial and legal biography, the privilege against self-incrimination, American slave law, capital punishment, abortion, the legal and moral dimensions of physician-assisted suicide, the use of the constitutional convention as a means of amending the Constitution, marriage and family law, the emergence and development of an anti-bribery ethic, law reviews, legal philosophy, the Judiciary Act of 1789, and political affairs and theory." Noonan's major publications include: