Justice Horace Harmon Lurton
Today’s Justice of the Day is: HORACE HARMON LURTON. Justice Lurton was born on this day, February 26, in 1844.
Justice Lurton was born in Newport Kentucky, but raised in Tennessee, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War as a sergeant major with the 5th Tennessee Infantry, the 2nd Kentucky Infantry and the 3rd Kentucky Cavalry. Justice Lurton was captured twice and escaped once during the war, before his mother persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to release him to her custody after his second term in captivity. He then attended Douglas University in Chicago, Illinois, and later graduated from the Cumberland School of Law with an LL.B. in 1867.
Immediately after graduation, Justice Lurton began working in private practice in his adopted home town of Clarksville, Tennessee (from 1867 to 1875, and then from 1878 to 1886); he was Chancellor of the Tennessee Chancery Court during the three year-long break in his career as a private attorney (specifically, from 1875 to 1878). He served as a Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court from 1886 to 1893, the year he was appointed by President Grover Cleveland to succeed then-Judge Howell Edmunds Jackson (who had recently been elevated to the SCUS) of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Justice Lurton would go on to hold that office until his own elevation to the SCUS; during that time he was also Dean of the law department at Vanderbilt University (from 1905 to 1909).
Justice Lurton was nominated President William Howard Taft on December 13, 1909, to a seat vacated by Justice Rufus Wheeler Peckham. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 20, and received his commission that day. Justice Lurton took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on January 3, 1910, and served on the White Court. His service was terminated on July 12, 1914, due to his death.
Justice Lurton is not particularly well-remembered today, perhaps owing to the relative brevity of his tenure. While on the bench he focused much of his energy on cases related to procedural issues and employer liability.