11–0, with four abstentions. Those four senators—North Dakota's William Langer, West Virginia's Chapman Revercomb, Montana's Burton K. Wheeler, and Michigan's Homer S. Ferguson—abstained due to uneasiness about Rutledge's support for Roosevelt's court-expansion plan. Ferguson later spoke with Rutledge and indicated that his concerns had been resolved, but Wheeler, who had strongly opposed Roosevelt's efforts to enlarge the Court, said that he would vote against the nomination when it came before the full Senate. The only senator to speak on the Senate floor in opposition to Rutledge was Langer, who characterized Rutledge as "a man who, so far as I can ascertain, never practiced law inside a courtroom or, so far as I know, seldom even visited one until he came to take a seat on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia" and commented that "[t]he Court is not without a professor or two already." The Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Rutledge by a voice vote on February 8, and he took the oath of office on February 15. Supreme Court (1943–1949) Rutledge served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1943 until his death in 1949. He penned a total of sixty-five majority opinions, forty-five concurrences, and sixty-one dissents. The deeply fractured Court to which he was appointed consisted of a conservative bloc—Justices Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, Stanley Forman Reed, and Owen Roberts—and a liberal bloc consisting of Justices Hugo Black, Murphy, Douglas, Rutledge, and sometimes Stone. On a Court plagued by internecine squabbles, Rutledge was, according to the legal historian Lucas A. Powe Jr., "the sole member both personally liked and intellectually respected by every other member". He found it challenging to write opinions, and his writing style has been criticized as unnecessarily prolix and difficult to read. Rutledge frequently and strenuously dissented—the scholar Alfred O. Canon wrote that he was "in many respects... the chief dissenter of the Roosevelt Court". Rutledge was one of the most liberal justices in the history of the Court. His approach to the law strongly emphasized the preservation of civil liberties, motivated by a fervent belief that the freedoms of individuals should be protected. Rutledge voted more often than any of his colleagues in favor of individuals who brought suit against the government, and he forcefully advocated for equal protection, access to the courts, due process, and the rights protected by the First Amendment.According to the legal