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More Than Peanuts. The result not only vindicated Martin Luther King's Montgomery bus boycott—it also keyed Johnson's whole judicial development. If a right applied in one area, he quickly applied it in another—always in spare, lucid opinions based on rock-hard facts. Thus, in 1963, Johnson broadened the Supreme Court's famous Gideon right-to-counsel decision (1961) by ruling that court-appointed lawyers must be paid for their services because the Constitution requires "effective" counsel. Congress soon followed with a law requiring payment in federal courts everywhere in the U.S. Conversely, last year Johnson condemned another kind of legal pay: the fees for convictions that Alabama justices of the peace had long pocketed as their only income. That ruling, faithful to a widely ignored 1927 decision of the Supreme Court, may kill the archaic j.p. system all over the South. "If a judge has a financial stake in the outcome," says Johnson, "he's disqualified."
Even in the 75% of his cases that resemble any other district judge's—from bankruptcy to counterfeiting—Johnson is a judge of rare innovation. Before handing out sentences in open court, for example, he follows the unusual practice of inviting all defendants and their families to discuss presentencing reports in the privacy of his chambers. His compassion is evident in even the most minor cases—many of which inevitably involve race. In one, a white man had allegedly hired four Negroes to help him steal peanuts from a federal warehouse. The jury acquitted the white man, convicted the Negroes. Poker-faced, Johnson dropped a balancing thumb onto the scales of Alabama justice as he handed down the Negroes' sentence: 30 minutes in the custody of the U.S. marshal.
Happy Reversal. In 1957, in another balancing problem—inequities in voting—Johnson's hewing to the law earned him his only civil rights reversal by the Supreme Court. In Tuskegee, where Negroes outnumber whites 4 to 1, the state legislature had gerrymandered the city in a 28-sided figure that barred all but four Negroes from voting in municipal elections. Citing Supreme Court precedents, Johnson held that he had no power over that particular kind of state action. By disagreeing, in Go-million v. Lightfoot (1960), the Supreme Court took the crucial step toward its historic "one man, one vote" decision in Baker v. Carr (1962). Not unhappy with the reversal, Johnson then restored the boundary lines in Tuskegee, where Negroes were soon elected to office.
Since then, the Supreme Court has sustained Johnsonian opinions all the way. After Baker gave U.S. courts power over state voting districts, Alabama tried to base apportionment of the legislature's upper house on geography rather than population. A three-judge court including Johnson voided that idea in Reynolds v. Sims (1962), which produced the first court order for reapportionment in U.S. history. After that, Alabama tried to bar Negro legislators by combining white and Negro counties. In voiding that scheme in Sims v. Baggett (1965), the judges reapportioned the legislature themselves—another national first.