Stephen Johnson Field - U.S. Supreme Court Justice

U.S. Supreme Court Justice

On March 6, 1863, Abraham Lincoln appointed Field to the newly created ninth Supreme Court seat, to achieve both regional balance (he was a Westerner) and political balance (he was a Democrat, albeit a Unionist one). The appointment would also give the Court someone familiar with real estate and mining issues. Field was confirmed by the United States Senate on March 10, 1863, and received his commission the same day.

"Field was one of the pioneers of the concept (beloved by many libertarian legal thinkers) of substantive due process — the notion that the due process protected by the Fourteenth Amendment applied not merely to procedures but to the substance of laws as well." Field's vocal advocacy of substantive due process was illustrated in his dissents to the Slaughterhouse Cases and Munn v. Illinois. Perhaps his most famous opinion was the majority opinion in Pennoyer v. Neff, an 8-1 decision which set the standard on personal jurisdiction for the next 100 years. His views on due process were eventually adopted by the court's majority after he left the Supreme Court. In other cases he helped end the income tax (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company), limited anti-trust law (United States v. E.C. Knight Company), and limited the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

On racial issues, Justice Field is regarded to have had a generally poor record. He dissented in the landmark case Strauder v. West Virginia, where the majority opinion held that the exclusion of African-Americans from juries that violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. He also joined the infamous case Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld racial segregation.

Early in his career, Field wrote opinions against California's laws discriminating against the Chinese immigrants to that state. Serving as an individual jurist in district court, he notably struck down the so-called 'Pigtail Ordinance' in 1879, which was regarded as discriminating against Chinese, making him unpopular with the Californian public. However, as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, he penned opinions infused with racist anti-Chinese-American rhetoric, most notably in his majority opinion in The Chinese Exclusion Case, Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889), and in his dissent in Chew Heong v. United States, 112 U.S. 536 (1884).

Field insisted on breaking John Marshall's record of thirty-three years on the court, even though he was not able to handle the workload. His colleagues asked him to resign due to his being intermittently senile but he refused, staying on until 1897. He lived only two years more, dying in Washington, D.C., and was buried there in the Rock Creek Cemetery.

Justice Field's aspirations to become Chief Justice went unfulfilled, as he had made many enemies both political and personal. He is the second longest serving Associate Justice. Field wrote 544 opinions, more than any other justice save for Justice Samuel Miller (by comparison, Chief Justice Marshall wrote 508 opinions in his 34 years on the court).

Associate Justice David Josiah Brewer was Justice Field's nephew.