Did You Know...

Back to School with Rutledge

Three decades before his Supreme Court appointment, a young Wiley B. Rutledge spent two years enrolled at Maryville College in eastern Tennessee. As seen in his sophomore yearbook, Rutledge maintained an active social life—playing center for the college’s football team, taking part in a social club dubbed “The Band of Bucks,” and belonging to the Athenian Literary Society. It was here that the future Justice honed his public speaking skills as he argued in several classroom debates and was an active member of various debating societies. Rutledge later recounted that these formal university debates exposed him to “many forms of thinking” and put him “in real touch with ideas” early in life.