David Josiah Brewer

David Josiah Brewer lived from June 20, 1837 to March 28, 1910 and was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1890 to 1910. An appointee of President Benjamin Harrison, he supported states rights, opposed broad interpretations of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, and voted to strike down economic regulations he felt infringed on freedom of contract; he and Justice Rufus W. Peckham were, according to legal academic Owen M. Fiss, the intellectual leaders of the Fuller Court. Born in Smyrna, in modern day Izmir, Turkey, to Congregationalist missionaries, Brewer attended Wesleyan University, Yale University and Albany Law School, then settled in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was elected to a county judgeship in 1862 and later served as a Kansas First Judicial District judge and Leavenworth County attorney before his 1870 election to the Kansas Supreme Court, where he served fourteen years. President Chester A. Arthur appointed him a federal circuit judge in 1884, and when Justice Stanley Matthews died in 1889, Harrison nominated Brewer, whom the Senate confirmed 53 to 11. He rejected the Supreme Courts 1877 decision in Munn v. Illinois upholding states power to regulate business, joined the majority in Lochner v. New York in 1905 striking down a New York labor law, but was not uniformly hostile to regulation, his majority opinion in Muller v. Oregon in 1908 sustaining an Oregon law setting maximum working hours for female laborers. He joined the majority striking down the federal income tax in Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Co. in 1895 and, writing for the Court in In re Debs the same year, upheld an injunction against strike organizers, while casting the deciding vote in Northern Securities Co. v. United States in 1904 to block a corporate merger on antitrust grounds. He generally ruled against African Americans in civil rights cases while consistently voting in favor of Chinese immigrants, opposed imperialism and rejected in the Insular Cases the idea that the Constitution did not fully apply to the territories, and his majority opinion in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States in 1892 contained a frequently criticized claim that the United States is a Christian nation.