Path to the Supreme Court
Melville Weston Fuller was born in Maine in 1833 and became a leading Chicago lawyer and Democratic politician, though he had never held high office and was little known nationally when Grover Cleveland named him the eighth Chief Justice in 1888. Small, courtly, and a gifted conciliator, he was chosen more for his skill at managing men than for judicial fame, and he presided for twenty-two years over a Court that sat at the height of the Gilded Age.
On the Supreme Court
Fuller's Court is remembered as the tribunal of laissez-faire constitutionalism — protective of property and business, skeptical of regulation, and the author of some of the era's most criticized decisions. Fuller himself wrote Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust, striking down the federal income tax and forcing the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment, and United States v. E.C. Knight, which gutted the Sherman Antitrust Act by holding that manufacturing was not 'commerce.' His Court decided Plessy v. Ferguson, blessing 'separate but equal,' and Lochner v. New York, striking a maximum-hours law in the name of 'liberty of contract.' A superb administrator who smoothed the Court's internal workings, Fuller served until his death in 1910.
The Voting Record
How Fuller voted in the 4,877 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1888 term through the 1909 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 Fuller voted with Gray more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 75.9% of their 464 divided cases — and with Harlan least, at 56.0%. See this Court →Compared against the 9 colleagues Fuller 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
Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co.
1895 · 5–4Holding · A federal tax on income from property is a direct tax that must be apportioned among the states, so the 1894 income tax is unconstitutional.
Role · Fuller wrote for the Court.
Struck down the income tax and stood until overturned by the Sixteenth Amendment (1913).
Read the opinion →United States v. E.C. Knight Co.
1895 · 8–1Holding · The Sherman Antitrust Act does not reach a sugar-refining monopoly, because manufacturing is not interstate 'commerce.'
Role · Fuller wrote for the Court.
Crippled early antitrust enforcement and exemplified the narrow commerce doctrine later swept away by the New Deal Court.
Read the opinion →Loewe v. Lawlor (Danbury Hatters' Case)
1908 · 9–0Holding · A union boycott in restraint of interstate trade violates the Sherman Antitrust Act, exposing union members to treble damages.
Role · Fuller wrote for the Court.
Turned antitrust law against organized labor — a blow to the union movement until Congress responded with the Clayton Act.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Melville Fuller is the great administrator of the Gilded Age Court — a small, courtly Chicago lawyer who had never held federal office when Cleveland made him the surprise choice for Chief Justice in 1888, and who then presided for twenty-two years over the Court of Pollock, E.C. Knight, Plessy, and Lochner. Start with Willard L. King's Melville Weston Fuller (1950), still the standard life — by the same biographer the site uses for David Davis (§37); then James W. Ely's The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller (1995) for the modern institutional reappraisal.
The Bookshelf
The standard biography, and a warm, thorough one — from Willard King, who also wrote the site's David Davis life (§37). King recovers the improbable rise: the Augusta, Maine, boy and Bowdoin graduate who became a Chicago railroad and commercial lawyer and active Democrat, never held federal office, and was Grover Cleveland's out-of-nowhere pick for the center chair after Waite (§43) died. King is best on the thing Fuller was best at — running the Court. Small in stature and genial in temper, Fuller kept a bench of egos (Field §38, Harlan §44, Brewer §51, later Holmes) collegial, and invented the conference handshake that survives to this day. Macmillan.
The modern institutional reappraisal, in South Carolina's Chief Justiceships series. Ely takes the Court as a working body — its docket, its internal management, its property-and-contract jurisprudence — and rescues Fuller from the caricature of a reactionary obstructing the modern state. He is especially good on Fuller's administrative gifts and on the coherence of the Court's economic constitutionalism, even where a modern reader deplores its results. The best short scholarly account of what the Fuller Court actually did. University of South Carolina Press.
Fuller's most consequential opinion, and the one the country reversed by constitutional amendment. Striking down the 1894 federal income tax as an unapportioned direct tax, Fuller handed the Gilded Age its starkest victory for property — and provoked a backlash that culminated eighteen years later in the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), which erased the decision from the Constitution. The rehearing is famous for its phantom switch: a justice who had favored the tax changed his vote, and Howell Jackson (§54) rose from his deathbed to try, and fail, to save it (see Shiras §53). Read it beside United States v. E.C. Knight Co., 156 U.S. 1 (1895), where Fuller held the Sherman Act did not reach the sugar-refining monopoly — Harlan (§44) dissenting again. Free online.
The Holmes Devise volume for the whole of Fuller's tenure, and the standing era anchor for this site from 1888 forward. Fiss reads the era as one long failure of constitutional imagination across race, labor, and empire, with Fuller presiding over a Court that could not conceive the state's affirmative power. Argumentative and theory-driven, but the indispensable frame for placing Fuller among his colleagues — the volume the biographies lean against. Macmillan.
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.King — for the standard life and the administrator's gifts
- 2.Ely — for the modern reappraisal of what the Fuller Court actually did
- 3.Pollock — for the income-tax decision the Sixteenth Amendment erased
- 4.Fiss — for the era whole — race, labor, and empire under one Chief
Where the Papers Are Kept
The Melville W. Fuller papers are principally at the Chicago History Museum (his adopted city) with additional material at the Library of Congress — the correspondence and Court files King mined for the 1950 biography. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The administrator's art. Fuller's reputation rests less on any opinion than on how he ran the Court: the conference handshake he introduced (every justice shakes every other's hand before business), the tact that held Field (§38), Harlan (§44), and Brewer (§51) in one working body, and a management style later Chiefs studied. Trace the institutional culture he built against Waite's (§43) collegiality and Taney's (§24) dominance — and note that, like Waite, he was a dark-horse administrator, not a famous jurist.
- Pollock and the amendment that answered it. Fuller's income-tax decision is one of only a handful ever undone by constitutional amendment. Reconstruct the politics from the 5–4 rehearing (the silent switch; Howell Jackson's §54 deathbed vote) to the Sixteenth Amendment (1913), and set it beside the era's other property victories — E.C. Knight gutting the Sherman Act, Lochner still to come. The Court that could not imagine the modern fiscal state.
- The two dissents that place him. Fuller joined Harlan (§44) in dissent in Wong Kim Ark (1898), against Gray's (§47) birthright-citizenship majority, and dissented with Lamar (§49) in In re Neagle (1890) against implied executive power to guard Field (§38) after the Terry affair. A property-minded conservative who was, on citizenship and executive power, a narrow constructionist. CJ line: Taney §24 → Chase §39 → Waite §43 → Fuller → Edward White (§55).