Path to the Supreme Court
William R. Day practiced law in Canton, Ohio, for a quarter-century as William McKinley's closest friend and counselor, and the presidency pulled him along: first assistant Secretary of State in 1897, Secretary of State through the summer of the Spanish-American War in 1898, then chairman of the peace commission that negotiated the Treaty of Paris and took the Philippines. McKinley put him on the Sixth Circuit in 1899 — briefly beside Taft (§69), and beside Lurton (§61) throughout — and Theodore Roosevelt elevated him to Shiras's (§53) seat in 1903.
On the Supreme Court
Day was a small, frail man with a trust-buster's streak and a states'-rights conscience, and his three great opinions are still argued about. Weeks v. United States created the federal exclusionary rule — unanimously, in 1914, decades before it reached the states. Buchanan v. Warley struck down Louisville's residential segregation ordinance, unanimous again — on property-rights grounds rather than racial equality, but the era's rare defeat for the machinery of Jim Crow. And Hammer v. Dagenhart, 5–4, struck the federal child-labor law as beyond the commerce power over Holmes's (§58) most withering dissent — Day's dual federalism held until Darby overruled it in 1941. He retired in 1922, served briefly as umpire of the U.S.–Germany claims commission, and died the next summer at his Mackinac Island cottage.
The Voting Record
How Day voted in the 3,949 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1895 term through the 1922 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career Day voted with Van Devanter more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 75.1% of their 358 divided cases — and with Harlan least, at 60.3%. See this Court →Compared against the 6 colleagues Day shared at least 300 divided cases with.
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Weeks v. United States
1914Holding · Evidence seized from a home without a warrant must be excluded from a federal prosecution.
Role · Day wrote for a unanimous Court.
The birth of the exclusionary rule — extended to the states in Mapp v. Ohio nearly a half-century later.
Read the opinion →Buchanan v. Warley
1917Holding · Louisville's block-by-block residential segregation ordinance violated Fourteenth Amendment due process.
Role · Day wrote for a unanimous Court.
Framed as property rights rather than racial equality — but it stopped the spread of segregation-by-ordinance at the height of Jim Crow.
Read the opinion →Hammer v. Dagenhart
1918Holding · The federal child-labor act exceeded the commerce power; regulation of production belongs to the states.
Role · Day wrote the 5–4 majority; Holmes (§58) dissented, joined by McKenna (§57), Brandeis (§67), and Clarke (§68).
The high wall of dual federalism — and the target of one of Holmes's greatest dissents — until United States v. Darby leveled it in 1941.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
William Rufus Day is the small, frail Ohioan — McKinley's confidant and Secretary of State, who negotiated the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War before Theodore Roosevelt put him on the Court — remembered for two opinions that pull in opposite directions: Weeks v. United States (1914), which gave federal courts the exclusionary rule, and Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), which struck down the federal child-labor law. His one book-length study is Joseph McLean's 1946 biography. Start there, read the two opinions, and set him in the era.
The Bookshelf
The only book-length life, from a Johns Hopkins study — a slim, careful account of a genuinely modest man. McLean traces the Ravenna and Canton lawyer, the intimate friendship with William McKinley that made Day first a diplomat (chief of the commission that negotiated the 1898 Treaty of Paris, ceding the Philippines and Puerto Rico) and then, under Roosevelt, a justice. Day was physically slight and personally retiring — he loathed Washington society and slipped home to Ohio whenever he could — and McLean's portrait matches the man: unshowy, conscientious, easy to underrate. The base account, if a dated one.
Day's most enduring opinion, and the origin of a rule that still shapes every criminal case. Holding that evidence seized by federal officers in violation of the Fourth Amendment must be excluded from federal court, Day gave the amendment teeth it had never had — a remedy, not just a right. The federal exclusionary rule of Weeks would be extended to the states in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) and fought over ever since. One quiet 1914 opinion at the root of a century of search-and-seizure law. Free online.
Day's most criticized opinion, and the other pole of his record. For a 5–4 Court he struck down the federal law barring the products of child labor from interstate commerce, holding that Congress could regulate commerce but not the conditions of production — a crabbed reading that drew a famous Holmes (§58) dissent and stood as a barrier to national reform until Darby overruled it in 1941. That the author of the pro-liberty exclusionary rule also wrote the anti-reform child-labor decision is the puzzle of a justice harder to categorize than he looks. Free online.
Day's tenure (1903–1922) straddles two Holmes Devise volumes, and both frame his record: Fiss's Troubled Beginnings for the late Fuller Court, Bickel and Schmidt's The Judiciary and Responsible Government for the White Court where Weeks and Hammer fall. Bickel and Schmidt are the fullest guide to the commerce-clause and criminal-procedure questions Day's two famous opinions decided. Macmillan.
The only substantial Day scholarship since the 1946 biography — a study of a problem Day lived daily: his sons practiced before the Court, and his recusal practice became an early case study in judicial-family ethics.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.McLean — for the one full life — the diplomat who became a justice
- 2.Weeks v. United States — for the exclusionary rule at its origin
- 3.Hammer v. Dagenhart — for the child-labor decision and Holmes's dissent (§58)
- 4.Bickel & Schmidt — for the White Court that decided both
Where the Papers Are Kept
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The exclusionary rule from Day to now. Weeks (1914) invented the federal exclusionary remedy; trace it to Mapp v. Ohio (1961), which imposed it on the states, and to the modern good-faith exceptions that have narrowed it. Day's quiet 1914 opinion is the headwater of the most-litigated question in American criminal law.
- The two-faced record. Reconcile the Day of Weeks (expanding a constitutional right against the government) with the Day of Hammer v. Dagenhart (blocking Congress from ending child labor). Is there a coherent principle — a strict formalism about spheres of power — or is he simply a conventional conservative caught between his instincts?
- The diplomat-justices. Day negotiated the treaty that made the United States an empire, then joined the Court that decided what the Constitution owed the new territories (the Insular Cases — Brown §52, White §55). Trace the small club of justices who came to the bench from high diplomatic or cabinet office (Chase §39 from Treasury, Day and McKenna §57 from the cabinet, later Byrnes §81) and what that path brought to their judging. Seat lineage: Shiras §53 → Day → Butler.