Stephen Johnson Field

Stephen Johnson Field
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
In office May 20 1863 – December 1 1897
Nominated by	Abraham Lincoln
Preceded by	(none)
Succeeded by	Joseph McKenna
Personal details
Spouse	Sue Virginia Field

Stephen Johnson Field (November 4 1816 – April 9 1899) was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from May 20 1863, to December 1 1897. Prior to this, he was the 5th Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court.

Born in Haddam, Connecticut, he was the sixth of the nine children of David Dudley Field I, a Congregationalist minister, and his wife Submit Dickinson. He grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and went to Turkey at thirteen with his sister and her missionary husband. He graduated from Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1837. While attending Williams College he joined Delta Upsilon Fraternity. After studying law in New York City with his brother David Dudley Field II, they practiced law together until 1848 when he went west to California in the Gold Rush. There his legal practice boomed and he was elected alcalde, a form of mayor and justice of the peace under the old Mexican rule of law, of Marysville. Because the Gold Rush city could afford no jail, and it cost too much to transport prisoners to San Francisco, Field implemented the whipping post, believing that without such a brutal implement many in the rough and tumble city would be hanged for minor crimes. The voters sent him to the California State Assembly in 1850 to represent Yuba County, but he lost a race the next year for the State Senate. His successful legal practice led to his election to the California Supreme Court in 1857, serving six years.

Stephen Johnson Field

Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the newly created tenth Supreme Court seat, to achieve both regional balance (he was a Westerner) and political balance (he was a Democrat, but a Unionist one). It would also give the Court someone familiar with real estate and mining issues.

He was a vocal proponent of the substantive due process theory that protected property rights from regulation under the Fourteenth Amendment--as illustrated in his dissents to the Slaughterhouse Cases and Munn v. Illinois. Field's views were eventually adopted by the court's majority, but only after his death. However, he helped end the income tax (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company), limit anti-trust law (United States v. E.C. Knight Company), and the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

On the issue of ethnic minorities, he had a mixed record. Field wrote opinions against California's laws discriminating against the Chinese immigrants to that state. However, Justice Field dissented in Strauder v. West Virginia, a case holding that the exclusion of African-Americans from a jury that convicted Strauder, an African-American, of murder, was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. He also joined the infamous case Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld racial segregation.

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[1] 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.

There was an assassination attempt on Justice Field by a former associate of his on the California Supreme Court, David S. Terry. Terry was shot and killed by Field's bodyguard. Ironically, legal issues arising from the shooting came before the Supreme Court in the 1890 habeas corpus case of In re Neagle. (See George C. Gorham, “The Story of the Attempted Assassination of Justice Field by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of California”, Journal of the Supreme Court Historical Society, Volume 30; Issue 2 (2005).)

See also

• Corporate personhood

External links

• Stephen Johnson Field at PBS
• Works by Stephen Johnson Field at Project Gutenberg