The youngest associate justice in Supreme Court history, Joseph Story, was also by some accounts one of the most consequential. Born in September 1779, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, – a coastal town north of Boston – Story was the son of a physician who had participated in the Boston Tea Party.
Story enrolled at Harvard at 16 (he was forced to leave his primary school early due to conflicts with one of his classmates and the schoolmaster), and studied to the detriment of his health (he would be afflicted by stomach problems throughout the rest of his life). Story nevertheless managed to finish second in his Harvard class in 1798, and then read law under Samuel Sewall, who would go on to become chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
Story was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1801 and built a reputation in commercial and maritime law. Personal hardship followed him through these early years: his first wife died a little over six months into their marriage, and his father died a few months later. His second marriage brought seven children, though only two survived to adulthood; the deaths of his children sent Story into spells of deep depression, and he memorialized such losses in poetry.
Before returning to law, Story spent time in the political arena – serving in the Massachusetts legislature beginning in 1805, winning a seat in Congress in 1808, and eventually becoming Speaker of the Massachusetts House in 1811 – all before turning 32. He ultimately decided to leave politics, saying party allegiance forced him to sacrifice his own views.
President James Madison nominated Story in November 1811 to fill the vacancy left by Justice William Cushing’s death, and Story was confirmed just three days later. At 32, Story is the youngest person ever to join the court. He would also rank among the longest-serving justices in the court’s history. Although Madison had hoped Story would serve as an ideological counterweight to Chief Justice John Marshall, he became one of Marshall’s closest intellectual allies on the bench instead, siding with him on nearly all of the era’s landmark decisions. Story’s judicial philosophy was grounded in what he called “legal science” – a conviction that the uniform application of law would make the nation stronger. (Andrew Jackson, suspicious of Story’s support of nationalism, reportedly called him “the most dangerous man in America.”)
Story authored a fair number of opinions between 1816 and 1823, with him and Justice William Johnson writing 113 between them (because Chief Justice John Marshall took the lion’s share, the remaining four justices were left with just 65). One of Story’s first significant opinions came in 1816’s Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, in which he authored the opinion establishing the Supreme Court’s appellate authority over state courts in federal matters – a ruling now regarded as “a fundamental principle in the function of the Supreme Court.”
Story’s record on slavery is complicated, given that he personally regarded the institution as repugnant to the principles of justice and humanity but felt constitutionally bound to uphold it; this produced two pivotal decisions late in his career. In 1841’s United States v. The Amistad, Story wrote the majority opinion freeing a group of Africans who had seized a Spanish slave ship, reasoning that because they had been illegally kidnapped, they were free individuals entitled to their liberty. (As a sidenote, Story was portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film adaptation of the Amistad case by Justice Harry Blackmun — the only known instance of one Supreme Court justice portraying another on screen). The next year in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, Story authored the opinion upholding the federal Fugitive Slave Act and striking down Pennsylvania’s protective state law, which critics have argued gave slavery a constitutional foothold it had not previously held so explicitly.
Story’s influence was also apparent off the bench. Beginning in 1829, while still serving as an associate justice, he became a professor of Law at Harvard. His Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, published in 1833, “set forth a philosophy of judicial restraint,” became a staple in American law schools, and was cited in two 1980 Supreme Court cases. Future Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that Story had “done more than any other English-speaking man in this century to make the law luminous and easy to understand.”
Story died unexpectedly on September 10, 1845, at the age of 65, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where he had delivered a dedication address years before. In 2009, Story was commemorated on a stamp souvenir sheet issued nationally by the U.S. Postal Service – per the USPS: “Joseph Story ranks as one of the nation’s most influential jurists … [h]is devotion to the uniform enforcement of federal regulations by all the states helped establish the preeminence of the Supreme Court.”
