Cooley, Thomas M. (1824–1898)

AuthorAlan R. Jones
Pages680-681

Page 680

Thomas McIntyre Cooley was a distinguished law teacher, state judge, first chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and author of the influential 1868 Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union. Born in western New York to a family with a Jeffersonian "bias," Cooley absorbed an anticorporate equal-rights ideology, fearful of "class legislation" that aided the few at the expense of many.

In 1843 Cooley went west to Michigan and combined activities in law, journalism, politics, and poetry. He helped organize the Free Soil Party in the state and in 1856 became a Republican. Narrowing his concerns to the law, he rapidly attained professional recognition. Appointed Compiler of the state's laws in 1857 and Reporter to the Supreme Court in 1858, he was selected in 1859 as a professor at the newly opened University of Michigan Law Department. In 1864 he was elected to the Michigan Supreme Court.

Cooley tempered his preoccupation with the law with historical and political values and naturally turned to constitutional questions. To Francis Thorpe's 1889 query on books for a constitutional law library he replied that "constitutional law is so inseparably connected with constitutional history and that is so vital a part of general history that I should not know where to draw the line."

Historical, COMMON LAW, and Jacksonian sensibilities were the presuppositions of Cooley's 1868 treatise, although his aim was merely to write "a convenient guidebook of elementary constitutional principles." The book was that; it had gone through six editions by 1890 and had a broader circulation, a greater sale, and more frequent citations than any other law book published in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The treatise was useful because no one prior to Cooley had systematically analyzed the cases and principles dealing with constitutional limitations on state legislative power. Chapters on constitutional protection to personal liberty, to liberty of speech, and to RELIGIOUS LIBERTY were supplemented with chapters on municipal government, EMINENT DOMAIN, taxation, and the POLICE POWER. Chapter Eleven, "Of the Protection to Property by the Law of the Land" attracted the most attention, for here Cooley discussed DUE PROCESS OF LAW and gave it a significant substantive definition. Cooley said that legislative restraints on property should be tested by...

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