When Illinois enacted a law forbidding this price gouging, however, Field responded with an angry dissenting opinion labeling this law “a “bold assertion of absolute power by the State to control at its discretion the property and business of the citizen.” Years later, after Congress enacted a modest income tax on upper-income earners, Field complained that it was an “assault upon capital” which “will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.”įield’s vision of the Court as the enemy of business regulation did not gain ascendance until shortly before his death in 1899, and Field would not live to see the early twentieth century decisions striking down minimum wages, protections for unions and federal child labor laws. In the 1870s, for example, nearly all grain grown in the Midwest was shipped through Chicago, where nine firms owned the city’s grain warehouses and they colluded among themselves to charge monopolists’ rates to farmers. The cause of Field’s life, however, was neutering the government’s power to enact economic and business regulation. Ferguson, and he authored another opinion permitting former Confederate officials to practice law in federal court (his presidential campaign would later tout this opinion as proof that he would appeal to Southern whites if he received the Democratic nomination).
Field joined the Court’s pro-segregation decision in Plessy v. Justice Field never became president, but he worked as a justice to implement the very same policies his campaign promised that he would support if elected to the White House. “The old Constitution,” Field’s campaign warned in a pamphlet that traced America’s original sin at least as far back as the John Adams administration, “has been buried under the liberal interpretations of Federalist-Republican Congresses and administrations, grasping doubtful powers and making each step towards centralization the sure precedent of another.” At a time when memories of Reconstruction still burned hot in the minds of Southern white supremacists, Field’s campaign argued that he was “the proper candidate of the party whose life-giving principle is that of local self-government.”
Claiming that “the chilling shadow of the empire” was descending upon the United States, Field fronted an anti-government campaign that would make all but the most strident modern day tea partiers blush. Based on my review of over 150 years of Supreme Court history in Injustices, here are the five jurists who stand out as the worst justices in American history: 1) Justice Stephen Johnson FieldĪs a sitting justice in 1880, Justice Stephen Johnson Field launched a dark horse bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Nor is the modern Court a vast improvement, with its incursions on voting rights and its willingness to place elections for sale.”Įven amidst this dark history, certain justices stand out as particularly mean-spirited, ideological or unconcerned about their duty to follow the text of the Constitution. The Court was the midwife of Jim Crow, the right hand of union busters, and the dead hand of the Confederacy.
As the book’s jacket explains, “the justices of the Supreme Court have shaped a nation where children toiled in coal mines, where Americans could be forced into camps because of their race, and where a woman could be sterilized against her will by state law. As you might guess from the title, it is not particularly complimentary of the Supreme Court as an institution. Today is the official release date for my book, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comforted and Afflicting the Afflicted.
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