Path to the Supreme Court
Stephen Johnson Field was born in Connecticut in 1816, went west in the Gold Rush, and became a rough-and-tumble California lawyer and state supreme court justice — once challenged to a duel from the bench. Abraham Lincoln named him to the Supreme Court in 1863, to a seat created partly to secure the loyalty of the Pacific states. A Democrat of fierce independence, he served thirty-four years, at the time the longest tenure in the Court's history.
On the Supreme Court
Field was the pioneer of what became one of the Court's most powerful modern doctrines: the use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect economic liberty and property against government regulation. In dissent for much of his career — in the Slaughter-House Cases and Munn v. Illinois — he argued that the 'privileges or immunities' and 'due process' of citizens included the right to pursue a lawful calling free of arbitrary interference. His dissents became the majority: the 'substantive due process' and 'liberty of contract' of the Lochner era grew directly from his thought. He also wrote Pennoyer v. Neff, the foundational case on the limits of a court's power over out-of-state defendants. Combative and ambitious to the end, Field served until 1897.
The Voting Record
How Field voted in the 7,455 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1863 term through the 1897 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 Field voted with Gray more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 60.3% of their 388 divided cases — and with Harlan least, at 50.9%. See this Court →Compared against the 8 colleagues Field 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
Slaughter-House Cases
1873Holding · (Dissenting) The Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause protects the fundamental economic rights of national citizenship, including the right to pursue a lawful occupation.
Role · Field wrote a principal dissent from the Court's narrow reading of the clause.
Planted the seed of the substantive economic due process that would flower in the Lochner era.
Read the opinion →Munn v. Illinois
1877Holding · (Dissenting) A state may not fix the rates of a private business; doing so takes property without due process of law.
Role · Field dissented from Chief Justice Waite's (§43) majority upholding rate regulation.
An early and influential argument for judicial protection of economic liberty against regulation.
Read the opinion →Pennoyer v. Neff
1878Holding · A state court cannot enter a binding personal judgment against a defendant outside its borders who was not served within the state.
Role · Field wrote for the Court.
The foundational decision on personal jurisdiction, still taught to every first-year law student.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Stephen Field has two real biographies, and they divide the labor cleanly. Start with Paul Kens's Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age (Kansas, 1997), the modern life that carries him from the mining camps to the making of substantive due process. Then read Carl Brent Swisher's classic Stephen J. Field: Craftsman of the Law (Brookings, 1930) — still the fullest legal portrait, by the same scholar who wrote the Taney-era volume that anchors this shelf.
The Bookshelf
The modern biography and the natural first read. Kens tells the whole improbable arc: the Williams-educated New Yorker who sailed for California in 1849, was alcalde of raw Marysville, rose to chief justice of the state's supreme court, and was placed by Lincoln on a newly created tenth seat in 1863 to hold the West for the Union. His argument is that Field's frontier free-labor individualism hardened, over thirty-four years, into the constitutional defense of property and 'liberty of contract' — the through-line from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age. The best single volume on why Field mattered. University Press of Kansas.
The classic biography, and still the fullest account of Field as a working judge — the circuit-riding, the opinions, the feuds, the marathon tenure. It matters here doubly: its author, Carl Brent Swisher, went on to write the Taney Period volume of the Holmes Devise history that frames the early-Court sections of this site, so the same careful hand covers both ends of Field's century. Brookings Institution; long available in reprint.
Field's own memoir of the Gold Rush frontier — the vigilante justice, the mining-camp law, and the feuds that forged the most combative justice of the Gilded Age. A vivid primary source, privately printed. 1893.
The birth of substantive due process, in the author's own words. Dissenting from Miller's Slaughter-House majority (§36), Field read the Fourteenth Amendment to protect 'the right to pursue a lawful employment' against state interference — and four years later, dissenting again in Munn v. Illinois, he denied that a state could fix the rates of a private business. Both dissents lost in his lifetime and won after it: the 'liberty of contract' that governed the Court through the Lochner era until 1937. Field is rightly called the father of the doctrine. Free online.
The deadliest feud in the Court's history, ending in a killing. Former California Chief Justice David Terry — enraged by Field's ruling against Terry's wife, Sarah Althea Hill, in the Sharon litigation — assaulted Field at a railroad station in 1889; David Neagle, the deputy marshal guarding him, shot Terry dead. In re Neagle held that Neagle had acted under federal authority and could not be tried by California — a landmark of federal supremacy born of Field's own near-murder. No other justice's life reads like this. Free online.
The most influential Field article ever written — McCurdy's demolition of the caricature of Field as a corporate tool, recasting him as a principled Jacksonian drawing a line between public power and private right. The starting point of the modern Lochner-era debate, and the essential companion to Kens's biography.
The book-length account of the maddest story in Supreme Court history — the Sharon divorce scandal, Sarah Althea Hill, and David Terry's vendetta against Field, which ended with a U.S. marshal shooting Terry dead at a railroad lunchroom in 1889 and the Court blessing it in In re Neagle. Howell-North Books.
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.Kens — for the modern life, Gold Rush to Gilded Age
- 2.Swisher — for the classic portrait of Field as a working judge
- 3.The Slaughter-House and Munn dissents — for the birth of substantive due process, in his own words
- 4.In re Neagle — for the deadliest feud in the Court's history
Where the Papers Are Kept
Field left comparatively few personal papers; surviving correspondence is scattered across the David Dudley Field family papers (his law-reformer brother) and California repositories including the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. His own memoir — see Manuscripts & Online — is the fullest first-person record, including his account of the Terry feud. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The father of substantive due process, born in the mining camps. A Williams graduate who went west in the Gold Rush, was alcalde of Marysville and chief justice of California before Lincoln placed him on a newly created tenth seat in 1863 to hold the West for the Union. His lone dissents in Slaughter-House (against Miller's majority, §36) and Munn v. Illinois lost in his lifetime and won after it — the Fourteenth Amendment's economic reading that ruled the Lochner era until 1937. The Slaughter-House thread again: Campbell §33 argued it, Swayne §35 and Field dissented, Miller §36 wrote the majority.
- The deadliest feud in the Court's history. In 1889 former California Chief Justice David Terry — enraged by Field's ruling against Terry's wife, Sarah Althea Hill, in the Sharon litigation — assaulted Field at a railroad station; deputy marshal David Neagle, guarding him, shot Terry dead. In re Neagle (1890) upheld Neagle's federal authority and made a federal-supremacy landmark out of a justice's near-murder.
- The endgame that ties back to Grier §31. Field surpassed Marshall as the longest-serving justice and stayed well past his powers; by the often-told account, when colleagues gently urged him to retire — the same errand Field himself had run to push the disabled Grier off the bench in 1870 — he snapped that "a dirtier day's work I never did in my life." A capstone to the mortal-court endgames thread (Grier §31, Clifford §34, Swayne §35). He was also a presidential aspirant (Democratic nomination 1880, 1884) — the political-ambition thread with Davis §37.