Justice William Burnham Woods
Today’s Justice of the Day is: WILLIAM BURNHAM WOODS. Justice Woods was born on this day, August 3, in 1824.
Justice Woods was born in Newark, Ohio, in the central part of the state where he was raised and would spend much of his professional life. He attended Western Reserve College in his home state before transferring to Yale College, which he graduated from with an A.B. in 1845.
Justice Woods entered private practice in his hometown of Newark in 1847, and would continue working as a private attorney until 1862, when he began fighting in the Civil War as a United States Army Major General of the 76th Ohio Infantry. Concurrent with his private legal career, he was also mayor of Newark, 1856-1857, and served in the Ohio House of Representatives (where he eventually rose to the position of minority leader, and later, Speaker), 1857-1862. Justice Woods’ military service came to an end in 1866, after which he decided to stay in the South, working in private practice in Mobile, Alabama for one year. In 1867, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he became a cotton planter while continuing to work as a private attorney. Justice Woods left those positions in 1868 to become Chancellor of the Middle Chancery Division in Alabama, where he would remain until 1869, when he was appointed to be a Judge of the U.S. Circuit Courts for the Fifth Circuit by President Ulysses S. Grant; he went on to serve on that court until his elevation to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Justice Woods was nominated from the state of Georgia by President Rutherford B. Hayes on December 15, 1880, to a seat vacated by Justice William Strong. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 21, and received his commission that day. Justice Woods took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on January 5, 1881, and served out his entire tenure on the Waite Court. His service was terminated on May 14, 1887, due to his death.
Justice Woods is not particularly well remembered today, possibly due to the relative brevity of his tenure on the SCUS. Perhaps the most famous controversy he took part in was The Civil Rights Cases (1883), in which he joined the odious opinion of the Court in invalidating the Civil Rights Act of 1875, helping enable much of the racial segregation that would become a sad hallmark of American life, particularly in the South, until the Warren Court’s legal revolutions of the 1950’s and 1960’s.