Field, Stephen J. (1816–1899)

AuthorCharles W. Mccurdy
Pages1035-1039

Page 1035

Stephen Johnson Field is a massive figure in the history of the United States SUPREME COURT. Appointed by ABRAHAM LINCOLN in 1863 following six years of distinguished service on the California Supreme Court, Field remained on the bench until 1897 and established a record for length of tenure since surpassed only by WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS. For two generations he preached a radically new gospel of constitutional interpretation that fused natural law concepts, a theory of adjudication based on formally bounded categories of public power and private right, and a designing foresight about the Court's unique capacity to shape American public life. Field's contributions to American constitutional development are conventionally summed up in the phrase laissez-faire CONSTITUTIONALISM. But his profound impact on the institutional character of the Court outlasted his doctrinal formulations. Field was arguably the Court's first self-conscious "activist," and he was certainly the first Justice to describe judicial protection of substantive rights as a democratic endeavor. "As I

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look back over the more than a third of a century that I have sat on this bench," Field wrote in his valedictory letter, "I am more and more impressed with the immeasurable importance of this court. Now and then we hear it spoken of as an aristocratic feature of a Republican government. But it is the most Democratic of all. Senators represent their states, and Representatives their constituents, but this court stands for the whole country, and as such it is truly "of the people, by the people, and for the people" It was this fundamentally new conception of the Court's position in the American system of government and the manifold ways Field acted upon it during his long career that prompted EDWARD S. CORWIN to describe him as "the pioneer and prophet of our modern constitutional law."

Field's jurisprudence was essentially a constitutional version of the equal rights creed expounded by ANDREW JACKSON in his veto of the bill rechartering the Second Bank of the United States. Field understood democracy in terms of "the natural equal rights of the citizen," particularly equality in the marketplace; he was quick to distinguish the common good of the whole people from the focused demands of interest seekers that sometimes generated legislation favoring some and discriminating against others. Since the Court, like the President, represented "the whole country" rather than a narrow constituency, Field claimed that JUDICIAL REVIEW of legislation was at once the moral equivalent of the executive veto and a consummately democratic power. His two most famous opinions resonated with the substantive concerns of antebellum Jacksonians. The first was designed to protect the rights of the many against legal privileges granted to a few. Dissenting in the SLAUGHTERHOUSE CASES (1873) Field denounced the "odious monopoly" produced by legislative skulduggery in Louisiana and claimed that the newly adopted FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT would become "a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing" if the Court continued to permit state legislatures "to farm out the ordinary avocations of life" to favored corporations. In the second, POLLOCK V. FARMERS LOAN & TRUST CO. (1895), Field resisted a statute that, in his view, was designed to enable the many to steal from the few under color of law. There he attacked the mildly progressive federal tax on incomes as an "assault on capital ? the stepping stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests ? become a war of the poor against the rich; a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness." If Field had been successful in persuading his colleagues to conceptualize the case as he did, the income tax would have been invalidated not because it was a DIRECT TAX but on the ground that its graduated rates violated the Constitution's requirement that "all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States." For Field, uniformity mandated equal treatment; the chief defect of the statute was that it created a different rule for rich and poor, thereby violating the first principle of republicanism articulated by his Jacksonian mentors.

Field's penchant for pouring his ideological predispositions into open-ended textual phrases such as "uniform" and "due process" was apparent to colleagues throughout his career. Many were alarmed by his expansive conception of the judicial function; some regarded him as a dangerous man. DAVID DAVIS called him a "damned rascal" in 1866 and HORACE GRAY likened him to a "wild bull" three decades later. HENRY B. BROWN said he was "a man of great determination and indomitable courage, though lacking in judicial temperament." Yet it was impossible to ignore him. What made Field so formidable was his skill in translating...

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