V. The White & Taft Courts
1910–1930
Holmes, Brandeis, and the Progressive Era. Lochner-era constitutionalism at high tide — and the seeds of its undoing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The "Magnificent Yankee" — thrice-wounded Civil War veteran whose eloquent opinions on free speech and legal pragmatism shaped constitutional doctrine for a century. The most literarily gifted justice in Court history.
William R. Day
McKinley's Secretary of State turned justice — a trust-buster's ally who wrote Hammer v. Dagenhart, striking down the federal child labor law he privately deplored.
William H. Moody
Theodore Roosevelt's Attorney General and one of the prosecutors in the Lizzie Borden case. Crippling rheumatism forced him off the Court after just four years.
Horace H. Lurton
A former Confederate soldier appointed by his old Sixth Circuit colleague William Howard Taft — at 65, the oldest justice ever appointed to that point.
Charles Evans Hughes
One of the great jurists of the 20th century — resigned to run for president in 1916, lost by whisker, returned as Chief Justice in 1930, and skillfully navigated the Court-packing crisis of 1937.
Willis Van Devanter
One of the "Four Horsemen" who blocked New Deal legislation. His 1937 retirement began the Court's retreat from Lochner-era constitutionalism.
Joseph R. Lamar
A Georgia Democrat appointed by a Republican president who had known him from a single golf vacation. Cousin of Justice Lucius Lamar — one of two cousin pairs in Court history.
Mahlon Pitney
A New Jersey chancellor and the Court's leading skeptic of organized labor — yet author of workmen's compensation rulings that upheld the emerging administrative state.
James C. McReynolds
One of the "Four Horsemen" and widely regarded as the most disagreeable justice in Court history — virulently antisemitic, he refused to speak to Brandeis or Cardozo for years.
Louis D. Brandeis
The "People's Attorney" and first Jewish justice. Pioneered the use of social science evidence in legal argument and wrote opinions on privacy that still define the field.
John H. Clarke
A Wilson progressive who resigned after six years — bored and frustrated — to campaign for American entry into the League of Nations.
William Howard Taft
The only person to serve as both President and Chief Justice — and the one who said the Court, not the White House, was the job he always wanted. A transformative administrator of the federal judiciary.
George Sutherland
The intellectual leader of the "Four Horsemen" who resisted the New Deal — and author of the landmark Curtiss-Wright opinion on presidential foreign policy power.
Pierce Butler
A railroad lawyer and son of Irish immigrants, one of the "Four Horsemen" — and the lone dissenter in Buck v. Bell, the forced-sterilization case, though he never explained why.
Edward T. Sanford
Author of Gitlow v. New York, which first applied the First Amendment to the states — the quiet beginning of the incorporation revolution. Died the same day as his Chief, William Howard Taft.
Harlan Fiske Stone
Author of Carolene Products footnote 4, laying the groundwork for heightened scrutiny of civil rights — one of the most consequential footnotes in legal history.
Owen J. Roberts
The "switch in time that saved nine" — his pivotal 1937 vote reversing his New Deal opposition ended the constitutional crisis over FDR's Court-packing plan.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Among the most admired legal intellects in American history. His opinions on New York's Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court transformed tort law, contracts, and constitutional doctrine.