Path to the Supreme Court
James Clark McReynolds of Elkton, Kentucky — Vanderbilt valedictorian, son of a Campbellite surgeon the neighbors called 'the Pope' for his certainty — made his name as the government's trust-buster against American Tobacco, and made himself unbearable as Wilson's Attorney General. In August 1914 Wilson solved his cabinet problem the traditional way: he promoted it. The Court absorbed the most poisonous personality in its history — and, in the era's strangest irony, one of the fathers of modern civil liberty.
On the Supreme Court
The record is double-entry. McReynolds the man was openly antisemitic — he would not speak to Brandeis (§67) for years, refused to sign the customary farewell letters to Brandeis and Cardozo (§75), and by the standard account read a newspaper through Cardozo's swearing-in; his harassment helped drive Clarke (§68) from the bench. (The tale that no 1924 Court photograph exists because he refused to sit beside Brandeis is debunked legend — he refused the extra sitting itself.) McReynolds the judge wrote Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters — liberty to learn, to raise one's children, 'the child is not the mere creature of the State' — foundations of substantive liberty from Griswold forward, and United States v. Miller, the era's lone Second Amendment case. As a Horseman he dissented to the end: when the Gold Clause Cases came down he extemporized from the bench, by press accounts, that the Constitution 'as we have known it, is gone.' He retired in 1941 and died alone in 1946 — no justice attended his funeral — having quietly supported thirty-three British children evacuated from the Blitz, and leaving nearly everything to charity.
The Voting Record
How McReynolds voted in the 4,841 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1914 term through the 1940 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 McReynolds voted with Butler more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 69.4% of their 425 divided cases — and with Stone least, at 29.6%. See this Court →Compared against the 9 colleagues McReynolds 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
Meyer v. Nebraska
1923Holding · Nebraska's ban on teaching modern foreign languages violated Fourteenth Amendment liberty.
Role · McReynolds wrote the 7–2 majority; Holmes (§58) dissented.
Liberty 'to marry, establish a home and bring up children' — the wellspring of substantive-liberty doctrine from Griswold to Obergefell.
Read the opinion →Pierce v. Society of Sisters
1925Holding · Oregon's compulsory public-school law unconstitutionally interfered with parents' control of their children's education.
Role · McReynolds wrote for a unanimous Court.
'The child is not the mere creature of the State' — the charter of educational liberty and of every school-choice argument since.
Read the opinion →Gold Clause Cases (Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio R.R.)
1935Holding · The 5–4 majority sustained the abrogation of gold clauses in private contracts.
Role · McReynolds wrote the Horsemen's dissent — and reportedly declared from the bench that the Constitution 'as we have known it, is gone.'
The old order's cry of despair, delivered extemporaneously as the New Deal's monetary policy survived.
Read the opinion →United States v. Miller
1939Holding · A sawed-off shotgun, absent evidence of militia utility, is not protected by the Second Amendment.
Role · McReynolds wrote for a unanimous Court.
The Supreme Court's only substantial Second Amendment holding for nearly seventy years, until Heller (2008).
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
James Clark McReynolds is the Court's great misanthrope — a Tennessee trust-buster turned reactionary, the most senior of the 'Four Horsemen' who fought the New Deal, and an open antisemite who would not speak to Brandeis (§67) and left the bench rather than pose beside him. Yet the same sour, solitary man wrote two of the century's landmark opinions on personal liberty, Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, protecting the right to learn a language and to choose a school. James E. Bond's I Dissent is the one biography. Start there, read the two liberty cases against the New Deal dissents, and reckon with the contradiction.
The Bookshelf
The only book-length study, and a fair-minded one about a man easy to caricature. Bond does not soften the ugliness — the antisemitism, the cruelty to colleagues and clerks, the refusal to sit next to Brandeis or to sign a Court photograph with him — but he takes McReynolds's jurisprudence seriously, tracing a consistent, if rigid, philosophy of limited government from the trust-busting attorney general through the New Deal dissents. He is especially good on the paradox at the center: that the arch-reactionary was also the author of Meyer and Pierce, foundations of the modern right to privacy. The essential and nearly the only source. Vanderbilt-adjacent scholarship, Acton Institute imprint.
The unlikeliest landmark in the book. Nebraska, in the anti-German fever after the First World War, had forbidden teaching any modern foreign language to young children. McReynolds struck the law down, holding that the 'liberty' of the Fourteenth Amendment includes the right to acquire knowledge, to marry, to raise children, and to worship as one chooses — a sweeping statement of substantive personal liberty from the Court's most conservative member. Meyer and its companion Pierce became cornerstones of the right to privacy the Court would build decades later in Griswold and beyond. Free online.
The companion to Meyer, and the second pillar of the liberty line. Oregon had required every child to attend public school, a measure aimed at Catholic and private schools; McReynolds, for a unanimous Court, struck it down, holding that the state may not 'standardize its children' and that parents have the liberty to direct their upbringing and education. Cited ever since in cases from religious liberty to the right to privacy, it is — with Meyer — the enduring and surprising legacy of a justice remembered mostly for what he opposed. Free online.
The setting for McReynolds's long war on the New Deal. Leuchtenburg's history of the constitutional crisis puts him at the head of the Four Horsemen — with Van Devanter (§63), Sutherland (§70), and Butler (§71) — the bloc that struck down New Deal statutes until 1937. It captures the venom of his dissents (in the Gold Clause Cases he departed from his written opinion to declare from the bench that 'the Constitution is gone') and the isolation of his final years. The best account of the fight that consumed him. Oxford University Press.
The most vivid inside account of any justice's chambers ever published — McReynolds's 1936–37 clerk recorded his employer's cruelty, his bigotry, and the strange loneliness of the household, against the backdrop of the Court-packing fight. Indispensable, appalling, unputdownable. University of Chicago Press.
The standard scholarly treatment of what makes McReynolds unique in the Court's history: an antisemitism so open he refused to speak to Brandeis, sit for photographs with him, or attend Cardozo's memorial. The documented case, laid out coldly.
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.Bond, I Dissent — for the whole difficult man and his consistent philosophy
- 2.Meyer v. Nebraska — for the surprising liberty landmark
- 3.Pierce v. Society of Sisters — for its companion and the parents'-rights pillar
- 4.Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn — for the Four Horsemen and the New Deal war
Where the Papers Are Kept
The James Clark McReynolds papers are held at the University of Virginia Law Library, with additional material elsewhere; the collection reflects a private, guarded man who destroyed much and left thin correspondence. The record of a justice who wanted to be forgotten as a person even as his opinions endured. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The reactionary as libertarian. How does the author of Meyer and Pierce — expansive charters of personal liberty — square with the Four Horseman who fought every New Deal regulation? Work out whether McReynolds held a single coherent theory of liberty that cut both ways, or whether the liberty cases and the economic dissents rest on different and incompatible instincts.
- The bigot on the bench. McReynolds's antisemitism toward Brandeis (§67) and later Cardozo (§75) was open and documented — the refusals to speak, the walkouts, the sabotaged Court photograph. Examine how the institution absorbed and worked around a colleague's naked prejudice, and what the episode reveals about collegiality, dissent, and the limits of the Court as a working body of humans.
- Meyer, Pierce, and the road to Griswold. The substantive-liberty language McReynolds wrote in 1923 and 1925 became raw material for the privacy jurisprudence of Griswold, Roe, and beyond — built by justices who were his opposite in every value. Trace how a doctrine migrates across ideological lines, and what it means that the modern right to privacy traces partly to the Court's arch-conservative. Seat lineage: Lurton §61 → McReynolds → Byrnes §81.