Justice Horace Gray
Today’s Justice of the Day is: HORACE GRAY. Justice Gray was born on this day, March 24, in 1828.
Justice Gray was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. in 1845, before earning an LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1849.
Justice Gray began a 13 year-long career in private practice in his home town of Boston in 1851, during which time he was also the Reporter of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (from 1854 to 1861). His career as a private attorney came to an end in 1864, the year he was appointed to be a Justice of Massachusetts’ highest court (at the time he was 36 years of age, the youngest person ever to serve in that institution); he would eventually rise to become Chief Justice of that court in 1873 (during his time there he would hire a brilliant law student and eventual SCUS Justice, Louis Brandeis, as a clerk). Justice Gray would remain on that court until his appointment to the SCUS.
Justice Gray was nominated by President Chester A. Arthur on December 19, 1881, to a seat vacated by Justice Nathan Clifford. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 20, and received his commission that day. Justice Gray took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on January 9, 1882, and served on the Waite and Fuller Courts. His service was terminated on September 15, 1902, due to his death.
Justice Gray is not especially well-remembered today, though he took part in some of the most high profile cases of the late-19th century. Sadly, he elected to join the odious opinions of the Court in the two major race-related cases he took part in, The Civil Rights Cases (1883), which severely restricted the ability of Congress to combat institutionalized racial discrimination in the states and declared that racially-motivated wrongful acts were outside the scope of the federal government’s authority, and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which first codified the idea that “separate but equal” accommodations are constitutionally acceptable into case law. Justice Gray also played a unique role in deciding the case that would prompt the passage of the 16th Amendment (specifically granting Congress the power to levy income taxes without apportioning them among the states), Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895), by switching from voting to uphold the government’s right to levy the tax in question to helping to strike it down (at least according to some, including Princeton constitutional scholar Edward Corwin).