Oliver Ellsworth

Oliver Ellsworth lived from April 29, 1745 to November 26, 1807 and was a founding father, attorney, jurist, politician and diplomat who helped frame the United States Constitution, served as a United States senator from Connecticut, and became the third chief justice of the United States. Born in Windsor, Connecticut, he attended the College of New Jersey, became state attorney for Hartford County in 1777, served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and as a state judge, and was a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, where he helped fashion the Connecticut Compromise between large and small states and served on the Committee of Detail, though he left before signing the finished document. As one of Connecticuts first two senators from 1789 to 1796 he was chief author of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which shaped the federal judiciary and established the Supreme Courts power to overturn contrary state court decisions, and he was a key Senate ally of Alexander Hamilton. President George Washington nominated him chief justice in 1796 after the Senate rejected John Rutledge, and Ellsworth served until 1800, when he resigned for poor health, remembered chiefly for discouraging the earlier practice of seriatim opinion writing. He simultaneously served as an envoy to France, signing the Convention of 1800 that ended the Quasi-War, and was succeeded as chief justice by John Marshall.