William Burnham Woods

William Burnham Woods lived from August 3, 1824 to May 14, 1887 and was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1881 to 1887, an appointee of President Rutherford B. Hayes. He wrote the majority opinion in United States v. Harris, involving the constitutionality of the Ku Klux Klan Act, and in Presser v. Illinois, involving the application of the Second Amendment to the states, both adopting a narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment; he dissented rarely and wrote mostly uncontroversial opinions. Born in Newark, Ohio, and a graduate of Yale University, Woods practiced law in Newark and rose to be speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. A Democrat who initially opposed the Lincoln administrations policies, he supported the Union once the Civil War broke out and joined the Union army as an officer, participating in a number of battles before his discharge as a brevet major general in 1866, after which he settled in Alabama to practice law and was elected to an Alabama state court on the Republican ticket in 1868. In 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Woods a circuit judge for the Fifth Circuit, covering six Southern states, where in the Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank he favored a broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that contrasted with the narrower one he later supported on the Supreme Court, and in another case he upheld separate but equal schools. Hayes nominated Woods to the Supreme Court in 1880 and he was confirmed by the Senate 39 to 8; on the Court he was a diligent worker who wrote more opinions than any other associate justice during his six year tenure, before falling ill in spring 1886 and dying in 1887.