Morrison Waite

Morrison Remick Waite, known as Mott, lived from November 29, 1816 to March 23, 1888 and was an American attorney, jurist and politician from Ohio who served as the seventh chief justice of the United States from 1874 until his death. During his tenure the Waite Court took a narrow view of federal authority under the Reconstruction era laws and amendments meant to expand the rights of freedmen and protect them from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Born in Lyme, Connecticut, he established a legal practice in Toledo, Ohio after graduating from Yale, served in the Ohio House of Representatives as a Whig, helped establish the Ohio Republican Party, served as counsel in the Alabama Claims, and presided over the 1873 Ohio constitutional convention. After the 1873 death of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, President Ulysses S. Grant nominated the relatively obscure Waite in January 1874, and the Senate unanimously confirmed him. He was not regarded as an important intellectual force on the Court but was well regarded as an administrator, and his majority opinion in Munn v. Illinois upheld government regulation of grain elevators and railroads while helping establish the legal concept of corporate personhood. He sided with the majority in the Civil Rights Cases, which struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a result not reversed until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.