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1981 Y.B. 37 (1981)
The Era of Melville Weston Fuller

handle is hein.journals/jspcth1981 and id is 39 raw text is: The Era of Melville Weston Fuller Jeffrey B. Morrist During the twenty-two years that Melville Weston Fuller was presiding over the Supreme Court, the United States experienced a wave of social tension, followed by a period of reform. Possessed by a spirit of jingoism, the United States acquired a small empire, and involved itself in great power politics to a greater degree than ever before. These were pivotal years as America, already the world's greatest economic power, moved from slower, rural times to a more urbanized and recognizably modem nation. While the results of some of the great cases to come before the Fuller Court seem unfortunate to today's observers, judged by the standards of its own time, the Court picked its way through an extraordinarily heavy docket of difficult issues. Its decisions were generally in tune with both the nation and consistent with its great tradition of independence. By the end of the era, the Court had greatly enhanced its power and that of other courts as overseers of the nation's economy. While the personnel of the Court numbered fewer superstars than in other times, they nonetheless worked together harmoniously, and had at the helm, a genuine leader of men. THE JUSTICES History has not been kind so far to the Justices who served while Fuller was Chief Justice. For decades the prevailing view of scholars has been that the Justices were mediocre' and their juris- prudence sterile.2 One distinguished observer wrote of the Fuller Court that it was a body dominated by fear-the fear of populists, of socialists, and communists, of numbers, majorities and democracy.3 In retrospect, the Court seems to have chosen the wrong direction in such significant areas of the law as government regulation of the economy, the rights of labor, and racial equality. But, even if this is so (and the most significant recent scholarship offers a somewhat different interpre- tation4), this was a Court of hardworking and honorable men, who mastered a huge caseload whose character was transformed from that of a predominantly common law docket to one domi- nated by questions of public law. Nineteen Associate Justices served with Chief Justice Fuller. Eight of these were holdovers from the time of Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite. The impact of five of these on the Fuller era came primarily from their previous deci- sions, for they died within half a decade: Stanley Matthews (1881-89), Samuel E Miller (1862-90), Joseph P. Bradley (1870-92), Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (1888-93), and Samuel Blatchford (1882-93). Matthews was ill when Fuller took his oath and the two never sat to- gether. Miller and Bradley were two of the most able figures ever to sit on the Court. Lamar's historic importance comes from his career in the Congress where he symbolized North-South reconciliation. Blatchford was the workhorse, who could be called upon to pen annually a huge quantity of cases in such areas as admiralty, patent, bankruptcy, and copyright law.' Blatch- ford wrote the opinion in Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway Co. v. Minnesota,6 the pivotal case when the Court accepted the due process clause as a substantive limitation on state legislative powers. Miller concurred in that deci- sion, while Bradley and Lamar were two of the three dissenters.7 Stephen J. Field (1863-97) was intermittently senile during his last years on the Court as he stubbornly insisted on breaking John Marshall's record for tenure. Nonetheless, Field contrib- uted to the triumph of his jurisprudential views, linking vested rights and the due process clause.

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