Woods, William B. (1824–1887)

• Author: Charles W. Mccurdy
• Pages: 2923-2924

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William Burnham Woods of Ohio was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1880 after eleven years of service as United States circuit judge for the Fifth Circuit. His tenure on the Supreme Court was brief (1881?1887); virtually all of his OPINIONS for the Court dealt with private law questions that came up under DIVERSITY JURISDICTION. He is remembered primarily for his collaboration with Justice JOSEPH P. BRADLEY, first on circuit, then on the Supreme Court, in the formulation of a jurisprudence for the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT. Although initially disposed to give the amendment a BROAD CONSTRUCTION, Woods ultimately retreated in the face of a more circumspect majority on the Supreme Court.

Woods's first meeting with Bradley, who had been assigned to the circuit upon his appointment to the Supreme Court, occurred at New Orleans in 1870. There they advanced a broad interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES clause in Live Stock Dealers & Butchers Assn. v. Crescent City Co. & Board of Metropolitan Police (1870), the first case, Woods noted in the report, in which the amendment was fully considered by a federal tribunal. The privileges and immunities of United States citizens, they contended, embraced all "fundamental rights," including that of pursuing any lawful employment in a lawful manner. "It is possible," Bradley admitted, "that those who framed the article were not themselves aware of the far reaching character of its terms," but its language clearly applied "as well to white as colored persons" and protected the rights of both against arbitrary state laws. Working from memoranda prepared by Bradley, Woods indicated in United States v. Hall (1871) that FREEDOM OF SPEECH and FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY were among the FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, opening the door for INCORPORATION

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of the BILL OF RIGHTS through the privileges and immunities clause. Over the dissents of Bradley and three others, however, the Supreme Court rejected each of these pioneering doctrinal formulations in the landmark SLAUGHTERHOUSE CASES (1873). Eleven years later, in BUTCHERS UNION SLAUGHTERHOUSE CO V. CRESCENT CITY LIVE STOCK CO. (1884), Woods joined with Bradley and Justices STEPHEN J. FIELD and JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN in one last trenchant protest against the majority's emasculation of the privileges and immunities clause. Woods surrendered altogether in Presser v. Illinois (1886)...