Justice Willis Van Devanter
Today’s Justice of the Day is: WILLIS VAN DEVANTER. Justice Van Devanter took the Judicial Oath to officially join the Supreme Court of the United States on this day, January 3, in 1911.
Justice Van Devanter was born on April 17, 1859 in Marion, Indiana. He attended Cincinnati Law School (today called the University of Cincinnati College of Law), graduating with an LL.B. in 1881.
Immediately upon graduation, Justice Van Devanter entered private practice in his home town of Marion, working there until 1884, the year he started a three-year stint as a private attorney in Cheyenne, a city located in the then-Wyoming Territory, which later became the state from which he would be appointed to the SCUS; he also briefly sat on the Commission to Revise the Statutes of Wyoming Territory in 1886. He was City Attorney for Cheyenne from 1887 to 1888, the year he served as Territorial Representative for the Wyoming Territory. Justice Van Devanter began serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Wyoming Territory in 1889, and remained in that office until the following year (he also briefly became Chief Justice of the Wyoming Supreme Court upon that territory’s attainment of statehood 1890), when he returned to private practice in Cheyenne for seven years. He started work as an Assistant Attorney General for the United States Department of Interior in 1896, and was made a Professor at Columbia University School of Law the following year. Justice Van Devanter went on to continuously hold both positions before his 1903 appointment as a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit by President Theodore Roosevelt, an office he held until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Van Devanter was nominated by President William Howard Taft on December 12, 1910, to a seat vacated by then-Associate Justice Edward Douglass White. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 15, and received his commission the following day. Justice Van Devanter served on the White, Taft, and Hughes Courts, and assumed senior status on June 2, 1937. His service was terminated on February 8, 1941, due to his death.
Justice Van Devanter was not a particularly prolific writer while on the bench, and today is most famous for having been one of the Four Horseman, a group of Justices whose conservative views – and opposition to the New Deal in particular – came to dominate the SCUS throughout the 1920’s and early 1930’s. It was his retirement and subsequent replacement by the emphatically pro-New Deal Justice Hugo Black that most clearly signaled the end of the Four Horseman’s conservatism.