Nation: Judge Clement Haynsworth

Judge Clement Haynworth

CLEMENT FURMAN HAYNSWORTH JR. is the scion of four generations of South Carolina lawyers. His great-great-grandfather, Richard Haynsworth, began his law practice in Sumter in 1813, after the family moved from Virginia. His great-grandfather, also a lawyer in Sumter, died serving in the Confederate army at Bull Run. In the 1880s, his grandfather founded the family law firm in Greenville that Haynsworth left in 1957 when President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In many ways, Haynsworth is the stereotype of a courtly Southern judge. He combs his gray hair nearly straight back, with just a slant to the right, and carries himself with an almost fastidious precision. He is, as one former law clerk describes him, "a quiet, serious, somewhat shy man who displays a good sense of humor once you know him." This trait emerges occasionally in mild, improbable pranks, as when his neighbors recently bought a new lawnmower. Haynsworth showed up with a beribboned bottle of Fresca to christen the new machine.

Haynsworth graduated summa cum laude in 1933 from Greenville's Furman College, founded by his great-great-grandfather Richard Furman. He went north to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1936. During World War II, he served in naval intelligence in the Pacific. In 1946, Haynsworth married the former Dorothy Merry Barkley, who had had two sons by a previous marriage. (The couple have no children of their own.) Haynsworth raises prize camellias in the greenhouse behind his $100,000 Greenville mansion, and in the evenings likes to listen to Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Mozart. An Episcopalian, he attends Greenville's Christ Church "as often as I can." He walks for exercise.

Although he is not registered with either political party now, Haynsworth listed himself as a Democrat until 1957. He supported Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. Haynsworth has never run for office himself, prefers to work for "the man I feel is best qualified for the job." His legal prose reflects the cadences of his life: measured, sedate and pellucid. His friends say that his facility with the written word is in part purposeful compensation for his tendency to stutter.