Path to the Supreme Court
The Peckhams were an Albany dynasty with a streak of tragedy: Rufus Sr., a congressman and New York Court of Appeals judge, went down with the Ville du Havre in 1873; brother Wheeler was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1894 and rejected 32–41 in Senator David Hill's patronage war with Cleveland. Rufus Jr. — Albany district attorney, corporation counsel, ten years on New York's high courts — got the family's second chance in December 1895, and the Senate confirmed him in six days.
On the Supreme Court
Peckham named an era. Allgeyer v. Louisiana made 'liberty of contract' constitutional doctrine for a unanimous Court; Lochner v. New York deployed it 5–4 to strike New York's ten-hour law for bakers, provoking Holmes's (§58) retort that the Fourteenth Amendment 'does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics' and giving three decades of jurisprudence their name. His literalism cut against corporate power too: Trans-Missouri Freight read the Sherman Act to condemn every restraint of trade, reasonable or not. And Ex parte Young built the fiction that still powers constitutional litigation — a state officer enforcing an unconstitutional law is stripped of the state's immunity and may be enjoined. He died in office in October 1909; Lochner outlived him as an epithet.
The Voting Record
How Peckham voted in the 2,707 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1895 term through the 1908 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 Peckham voted with Brewer more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 69.0% of their 539 divided cases — and with Harlan least, at 39.1%. See this Court →Compared against the 6 colleagues Peckham 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
Allgeyer v. Louisiana
1897Holding · The Fourteenth Amendment's 'liberty' includes freedom of contract; Louisiana's insurance restriction fell.
Role · Peckham wrote for a unanimous Court.
The first liberty-of-contract strike-down — the doctrinal seed of the Lochner era.
Read the opinion →Lochner v. New York
1905Holding · New York's ten-hour law for bakers violated liberty of contract.
Role · Peckham wrote the 5–4 majority; Harlan (§44) and Holmes (§58) dissented.
The case that named an age — and, through Holmes's dissent, defined the modern debate over judicial restraint.
Read the opinion →Ex parte Young
1908Holding · Federal courts may enjoin state officers from enforcing unconstitutional state laws, sovereign immunity notwithstanding.
Role · Peckham wrote the opinion; Harlan (§44) dissented.
The procedural engine of constitutional litigation ever since — every suit against a state officer runs through Young.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Rufus Peckham gave an era its name. A New York judge of old Albany stock, he wrote Lochner v. New York (1905) — the decision that made 'liberty of contract' a constitutional trump and 'the Lochner era' a byword for judicial defense of laissez-faire — and, eight years earlier, Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897), where the doctrine was born. Yet no one has written his biography. Approach him through the Friedman & Israel chapter for the life, the two opinions for the doctrine, and Fiss's Holmes Devise volume for the Court that made them.
The Bookshelf
The fullest connected life of a justice no biographer has claimed — and for once the gap is a real puzzle, because Peckham's name is on one of the most famous decisions in American law. The Chelsea House chapter gives the essentials: the Albany dynasty (his father, also Rufus, sat on New York's high court and died at sea), the corporate practice, the New York Court of Appeals, and Cleveland's 1896 appointment. It is candid that the man behind Lochner remains oddly opaque — a hard, dry, private conservative who left little of himself behind.
The most notorious economic-liberty decision in the Court's history. Striking down New York's ten-hour law for bakers, Peckham held that the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause protects a 'liberty of contract' the state may not curtail for mere labor regulation. The opinion drew Harlan's (§44) dissent and, more famously, Holmes's (§58) — 'the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics' — the single most quoted dissent in American law. 'Lochnerism' became the epithet for judicial protection of business against reform, repudiated only in 1937. Free online — read it beside Holmes's four paragraphs.
The overture to Lochner, and the first time the Court struck down a state law on substantive-due-process 'liberty of contract' grounds. Peckham's unanimous opinion voided a Louisiana insurance regulation as an interference with the freedom to contract — planting the doctrine that Field (§38) had preached in dissent for decades and that Peckham would bring to full flower eight years later. Read it to see the idea before it acquired its era's name. Free online.
The Holmes Devise volume for Peckham's tenure and the era anchor for this shelf — and the fullest account anywhere of the liberty-of-contract jurisprudence Peckham crystallized. Fiss treats Lochner not as an aberration but as the coherent (if, to a modern eye, mistaken) constitutionalism of a Court that could not conceive the regulatory state. For a justice without a biography, this is where his one great doctrine is best understood. Macmillan.
The leading modern reassessment of the man who wrote Lochner — Ely's case that Peckham was no crude tool of capital but a coherent economic-liberty jurist in the Jacksonian antimonopoly tradition. For a justice with no biography, this is the essential study.
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.The Friedman & Israel chapter — for the fullest life of an oddly undocumented justice
- 2.Lochner v. New York — for the opinion that named an era — read beside Holmes's dissent (§58)
- 3.Allgeyer v. Louisiana — for where liberty of contract began
- 4.Fiss — for the Fuller Court jurisprudence Lochner crystallized
Where the Papers Are Kept
No substantial collection of Peckham papers is known; scattered material survives in New York repositories and in the records of the Court. The thin archive is part of why the author of Lochner has never had a biographer. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The most famous justice no one has written about. Reconstruct why Peckham — whose Lochner is taught in every constitutional-law course — has no biography, while forgotten colleagues sometimes do. Is it the thinness of his papers, the coldness of the man, or the way 'Lochnerism' became an abstraction detached from its author? A case study in how a doctrine can eclipse a person.
- From Field's dissents to Peckham's majorities. Trace liberty of contract from Field's (§38) lonely Slaughter-House and Munn dissents through Allgeyer (1897) to Lochner (1905): the doctrine took thirty years to move from dissent to law. Then trace it forward to its 1937 repudiation (West Coast Hotel) — the whole rise and fall of economic substantive due process, with Peckham at its peak.
- Lochner and its dissent as a matched pair. Peckham's majority and Holmes's (§58) dissent are the most studied opposing four pages in American law. Read them against each other on the proper role of the judge — Peckham defending a fixed liberty, Holmes insisting the Constitution 'is not intended to embody a particular economic theory.' Seat lineage: Howell Jackson §54 → Peckham → Lurton §61 (both in the same Progressive-era cohort).