Justice Joseph McKenna
Today’s Justice of the Day is: JOSEPH McKENNA. Justice McKenna was born on this day, August 10, in 1843.
Justice McKenna was born to Irish immigrants in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but he later relocated to California, the state where he received his university education, spent virtually his entire professional life, and from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He attended St. Augustine’s College in Benicia, California, located in the upper San Francisco Bay Area, and graduated in 1865.
Immediately after graduation, Justice McKenna entered private practice for one year in the nearby city of Fairfield, California, before becoming District Attorney of Solano County, California (a jurisdiction that includes both Benicia and Fairfield) in 1866. He left that office in 1870, and returned to work as a private attorney, now in Suisun, California (also located within Solano County), until 1875, when he became a Member of the California State Assembly. Justice McKenna left that position the following year, and later served in the United States House of Representatives from 1885 to 1892. He became the United States Attorney General in 1897, but left office later that same year when President Benjamin Harrison appointed him to be a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he would remain until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice McKenna was nominated by President William McKinley on December 16, 1897, to a seat vacated by Justice Stephen Johnson Field. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 21, 1898, and received his commission that day. Justice McKenna took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on January 26, and served on the Fuller, White, and Taft Courts. His service was terminated on January 5, 1925, due to his retirement.
Before even taking office, serious doubts were raised about Justice McKenna’s ability to serve due to his lack of experience. Ironically, he himself actually seemed to share some of these concerns, and made a point of attending classes at Columbia Law School before joining the SCUS. There were also serious issues with Justice McKenna’s ability to serve towards the end of his career, as a stroke left him severely disabled for roughly the last decade of his time in office; despite his health problems, he insisted on serving for as long as he could, and supposedly had to be just about forced off the bench by Chief Justice William Howard Taft. Whatever the concerns about his abilities, there can be little doubt that his Republican-leaning ideology had a significant impact on the SCUS’s direction. For example, he provided a crucial fifth vote for the opinion of the Court in Lochner v. New York (1905), a decision which held that the Fourteenth Amendment included a supposed “freedom of contract” that nullified governmental interference in many matters between employees and employers. This ruling would dominate SCUS jurisprudence on economic affairs for more than a quarter of a century, and was only undone by the Court’s leftward lurch following the appointment of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Justices.