Justice Henry Billings Brown
Today’s Justice of the Day is: HENRY BILLINGS BROWN. Justice Brown was born on this day, March 2, in 1836.
Justice Brown was born in South Lee, Massachusetts, the son of a fairly privileged family. He graduated from Yale College with a B.A. in 1856, before going on to attend Yale Law School and Harvard Law School.
In 1860, Justice Brown began a year-long stint in private practice in Detroit, Michigan and became a Lecturer in Law at the University of Michigan (he would hold the latter position until he was appointed a United States District Judge), before serving as a Deputy United States Marshal for the Eastern District of Michigan (from 1861 to 1863). He was then Assistant United States Attorney for that same district in Michigan, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, from 1863 to 1868, the year he served as a Judge of the Wayne County Circuit Court (also located in Michigan) and returned to private practice. Justice Brown was also a professor of medical jurisprudence from 1868 to 1871. He was appointed a Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan by President Ulysses S. Grant and left private practice in 1875. Justice Brown ultimately served on that court until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Brown was nominated President Benjamin Harrison on December 23, 1890, to a seat vacated by Justice Samuel Freeman Miller. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 29, and received his commission that day. Justice Brown took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on January 5, 1891, and served out his entire tenure on the Fuller Court. His service was terminated on May 28, 1906, due to his retirement.
Justice Brown is not especially well-remembered today, though he has become somewhat infamous for his authorship of the opinion of the Court in the terribly-decided Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In that decision the SCUS essentially held that African Americans were a separate and inferior race compared to their Caucasian counterparts, a view that was almost certainly shared by a majority of Americans (and especially Caucasian Americans) at the time. Plessy went on to play a huge role in keeping American law from seriously tackling institutionalized racial discrimination until it was fully overturned by the Warren Court.