About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

24 QLR 301 (2005-2006)
The Wheeler Court

handle is hein.journals/qlr24 and id is 313 raw text is: THE WHEELER COURT By Wesley W. Horton and Brendon P. Levesque* George W. Wheeler sat on the Connecticut Supreme Court from September 1910 until December 1930, the last ten years as chief justice. He dominated the Court intellectually, usually as a dissenter while an associate justice, and usually as the author of the Court's opinion while chief justice. The story of the Supreme Court for the twenty years from 1910 to 1930 is therefore largely the story of George Wheeler. Before we talk about Wheeler, however, let us talk about the justices he joined in 1910. The Supreme Court had just finished a spectacular era spanning fifteen years from 1893 to 1908, during which time William Hamersley and Simeon Baldwin put Connecticut back on the national legal map. It had been absent since the 1810s, when it was under the leadership of Zephaniah Swift and Tapping Reeve. State constitutional questions concerning separation of powers and individual rights came to the forefront and were handled with distinction by Hamersley and Baldwin.' Hamersley retired in late 1908 and Baldwin in early 1910. With the exception of Samuel Prentice, about whom more anon, the other justices on the Court at the time of Wheeler's appointment were pedestrian judges about whose opinions there is little or nothing to say. Frederick Hall had been on the Court since 1897, succeeded Baldwin as chief justice in February 1910, and died in office in 1913. As associate justice, he wrote nothing worth discussing in the Baldwin-Hamersley article, and he wrote nothing as chief justice worth . Both of the Hartford Bar. Portions of the text concerning Wheeler's dissenting opinions previously appeared in Wesley W. Horton & John A. Reed, Seven Angry Men, 35 CONN. L. REv. 1577 (2000). This article is the sixth in a series of essays on the history of the Connecticut Supreme Court. The prior five essays are: Wesley W. Horton, Day, Root & Kirby, 70 CONN. B.J. 407 (1996); Wesley W. Horton, Hosmer to Peters to Daggett, 73 CONN. B.J. 275 (1999); Wesley W. Horton, The Pre-Civil War Connecticut Supreme Court, 34 CONN. L. REV. 1209 (2002); Wesley W. Horton & Jeffrey J. White, The Butler-Park Court, 37 CONN. L. REV. 351 (2005); Wesley W. Horton & Jeffrey J. White, The Baldwin-Hamersley Court, 77 CONN. B.J. 245 (2005). 1. See Horton & White, The Baldwin-Hamersley Court, supra note*. 301

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most