Path to the Supreme Court
William Howard Taft is the only person to have led both the executive and judicial branches of the United States. Born in Cincinnati in 1857, he served as a federal judge, the first civil governor of the Philippines, and Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war before winning the presidency in 1908 — a term he found miserable, losing re-election in 1912 after Roosevelt split the party. His ambition had always been the Court, not the White House, and in 1921 President Harding gave him what he wanted, naming him the tenth Chief Justice. 'I don't remember that I ever was President,' he liked to say.
On the Supreme Court
Taft was the great administrator of the modern Court. He lobbied Congress into passing the Judges' Bill of 1925, which gave the Court broad discretion, through the writ of certiorari, to choose its own cases — the most important reform of its docket in history — and he campaigned successfully for the Court to have its own building, the marble temple it occupies today, though he did not live to see it completed. On the bench he wrote Myers v. United States, upholding a broad presidential power to remove executive officers, and struck down a federal child-labor tax in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture. A conservative on economic regulation, he prized the Court's efficiency and dignity above all. He resigned in failing health in 1930 and died weeks later.
The Voting Record
How Taft voted in the 1,606 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1921 term through the 1929 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.
Where Taft sat among the colleagues on the same bench — and whether that Court divided clearly enough for the question to have an answer — is laid out Court by Court. See this Court →
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Myers v. United States
1926 · 6–3Holding · The President has the constitutional power to remove executive officers he has appointed, without the Senate's consent.
Role · Taft, drawing on his own experience as President, wrote for the Court.
A foundational and still-contested decision on presidential control of the executive branch, central to modern separation-of-powers disputes.
Read the opinion →Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. (Child Labor Tax Case)
1922 · 8–1Holding · Congress cannot use its taxing power as a pretext to regulate matters — here, child labor — reserved to the states.
Role · Taft wrote for the Court.
Part of the pre-New Deal line limiting federal power over the economy; effectively overtaken after 1937.
Read the opinion →Olmstead v. United States
1928 · 5–4Holding · Wiretapping a telephone without any physical trespass is not a 'search or seizure' under the Fourth Amendment.
Role · Taft wrote for the Court, over a famous dissent by Brandeis (§67) defending 'the right to be let alone.'
Governed electronic surveillance until overruled by Katz v. United States (1967, Stewart §92); Brandeis's dissent became one of the most influential in the Court's history.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
William Howard Taft is the only person ever to hold both of the offices at the top of two branches — President of the United States (1909–1913) and Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930) — and he was miserable in the first and blissful in the second. He never wanted the White House; he wanted the center chair, and when Warren Harding finally gave it to him he became one of the most consequential Chief Justices in the Court's history: not for his opinions, though he wrote the great removal-power case Myers v. United States, but for rebuilding the institution itself. He pushed through the Judiciary Act of 1925 that gave the Court control of its own docket, lobbied a marble Supreme Court building into existence, and drove the Court toward unanimity with a genial force of will. Henry Pringle's two-volume life is the standard biography; Alpheus Mason's book covers the judicial years; and Robert Post's Holmes Devise volume is now the definitive history of the Court he built.
The Bookshelf
The standard biography, by the author of the Pulitzer-winning Theodore Roosevelt life. Pringle's two volumes cover the whole of Taft's career — the Ohio judge, the governor-general of the Philippines, the reluctant president handpicked by Roosevelt and then estranged from him, and at last the Chief Justice who found his happiness on the bench. Written with access to Taft's vast correspondence, it is thorough, readable, and shrewd about a man who confessed he could not remember ever wanting to be president but had wanted to be Chief Justice all his life. The essential life, and the place to begin. Farrar & Rinehart, two volumes.
The best brief introduction to the whole career — Jeffrey Rosen's compact life in the American Presidents series, unusually attentive to the constitutional convictions that made Taft a reluctant president and a contented Chief Justice. Times Books.
The modern scholarly reassessment, strong on the through-line of Taft's career — a judicial temperament miscast in the presidency and finally at home on the bench. Cambridge University Press.
The standard scholarly account of the troubled 1909–1913 presidency — the tariff, the Ballinger–Pinchot affair, and the rupture with Theodore Roosevelt that split the Republican Party and cost Taft the White House. The volume on Taft in the authoritative American Presidency Series. (Pair it with Donald F. Anderson's William Howard Taft: A Conservative's Conception of the Presidency, 1973, on his theory of executive power.) University Press of Kansas.
The psychological and personal life — a candid portrait of Taft's marriage, his ambition (much of it Nellie's), and the weight, literal and figurative, he carried through public life. W. W. Norton.
The study of the interregnum — Taft's years out of office (1913–1921) as a Yale professor and public man, campaigning quietly for the Chief Justiceship he had wanted all along and finally won from Harding. University Press of Kansas.
The best book on Taft as Chief Justice, by the great judicial biographer who also wrote the lives of Brandeis (§67) and Stone (§73). Mason draws on the Taft papers to show the Chief at work: the campaign for the Judges' Bill of 1925, the crusade for a building of the Court's own, the management of a bench that included Holmes (§58), Brandeis, and the Four Horsemen, and the relentless drive for unanimity that made Taft distrust dissent. The indispensable account of how Taft remade the modern Court from the center chair. Simon & Schuster.
The long-awaited, monumental history of Taft's Court — three volumes, decades in the making, and now the definitive account of the era. Post, a leading constitutional scholar, reconstructs the whole institution Taft rebuilt: the reform of the docket, the fight for the building, the internal politics of a Court split between its progressives and its Four Horsemen, and the flood of business, tax, and civil-liberties cases that made law for the 1920s. The era anchor for §68–§73, and a masterpiece of Court history. Cambridge University Press.
Taft's own book on the presidency, written between his two great offices — the classic statement of the constitutionally modest 'stewardship' view of executive power, composed in pointed answer to Theodore Roosevelt's expansive one. Columbia University Press.
Taft's most important opinion, and the one place his presidency and his Chief Justiceship meet. Holding that the president may remove executive officers without the Senate's consent, the former president wrote an expansive account of executive power that still anchors the modern law of the administrative state — later trimmed by Humphrey's Executor (1935) but never overruled at its core, and revived in the removal-power fights of the twenty-first century. The rare case decided by a Chief Justice who had himself held the office at issue. Free online.
Taft the conservative Chief at work. Writing for the Court, he struck down Congress's attempt to end child labor through a federal tax, holding it a penalty invading the states' domain — one of the era's decisions curbing national regulatory power, and a foil to the New Deal Court that followed. Free online.
Lurie's focused study of what Taft actually built from the center chair: the Judiciary Act of 1925 and the certiorari revolution, the campaign for the Supreme Court building, the lobbying of presidents about appointments. The book about Taft the judicial architect, distinct from his Travails biography on this shelf. University of South Carolina Press.
Half of Goodwin's 900-page epic is a full Taft biography — the most widely read treatment of the man in half a century, carrying him from Cincinnati through the presidency to the 1912 rupture with Roosevelt. It ends before the chief justiceship, which is exactly why it pairs with Mason and Lurie rather than duplicating them. Simon & Schuster.
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.Pringle, volume one — for the reluctant president who wanted the Court instead
- 2.Mason, Taft: Chief Justice — for the rebuilding of the institution — docket, building, unanimity
- 3.Myers v. United States — for his great opinion on presidential removal power
- 4.Post, The Taft Court — for the definitive history of the Court he made
- 5.Rosen, American Presidents Taft — for the short life that ties the president to the chief justice
Where the Papers Are Kept
The William Howard Taft papers at the Library of Congress are vast — one of the great presidential-and-judicial collections, covering the Philippine years, the presidency, and the Chief Justiceship, and long since microfilmed. The documentary base for Pringle, Mason, and Post alike. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- President and Chief Justice. Taft is the only person to lead both a branch of the government and the Court that checks it. Use his double career to probe the relationship between the political and judicial roles: did the ex-president's view of executive power (Myers) reflect the office he had held, and what does it mean that the man who most wanted to be Chief Justice was so unhappy as president?
- The Court's builder. Taft may have shaped the modern Court more as an administrator than any Chief did as a jurist — the certiorari-driven docket (the Judges' Bill, drafted by Van Devanter §63), the marble building, the push for institutional prestige and unanimity. Assess the Chief Justice as institution-builder, and set Taft beside Hughes §62 and Warren §88 as managers of the Court rather than authors of doctrine.
- The enemy of dissent. Taft believed public disagreement among the justices weakened the Court, and he worked to suppress dissents and concurrences in the name of a united bench — even as Holmes (§58) and Brandeis (§67) were making the dissent into the engine of constitutional change. Trace the argument over the value of dissent from Taft's unanimity to the modern Court's routine 6–3 splits. CJ line: White §55 → Taft → Hughes §62.