The next chief justice in our series, Melville Fuller, although today relatively unknown, presided over some of the most important cases in the history of the Supreme Court. (He also instituted the practice of having the justices shake hands before private conferences and before taking the bench.)
The eighth chief justice was born in Maine in 1833 to a family of Jacksonian Democrats, and was raised in the house of his grandfather, the state’s chief justice. Fuller graduated from Bowdoin College in 1853, read law in Maine, and after a brief stint (six months) at Harvard Law School passed the bar.
Fuller then moved west to Chicago, where – along with a legal career specializing in real estate and commercial law – he managed Stephen Douglas’ 1860 presidential campaign (which was a fairly important election). Fuller also served in the Illinois House of Representatives for two years, was elected president of the state bar association, and was a delegate to the Illinois constitutional convention of 1862. (His Illinois House colleagues reportedly were left unhappy when Fuller publicly opposed their gold pens as a waste of public spending.)
Before President Grover Cleveland nominated Fuller to be chief justice in April 1888, Fuller had declined two other offers by Cleveland, one to be the chairman of the Civil Service Commission and the other to be solicitor general of the United States.
The Senate took three months to confirm Fuller, with concerns over his perceived favoritism towards corporations and questionable loyalty to the Union. There was little doubt that Fuller, at least on paper, was qualified for the position, however. Besides his long legal career, he had previously argued multiple cases before the court.
Two other rather unusual topics came up during Fuller’s confirmation: his facial hair (Fuller sported quite a mustache), and his penchant for poetry. “The greatest objection that has been urged against Chief Justice Fuller is that he wears a mustache,” reported the Chicago Tribune. But then added: “He will be confirmed by a large majority, and without a close shave.” His poetry, meanwhile, was another subject, according to the Journal of Supreme Court History: “articles asserted that Fuller was a mediocre amateur poet and, as such, was not fit to sit on the high Bench.”
Despite these lapses, Fuller was confirmed, and took his judicial oath in October 1888.
As was feared by some during Fuller’s confirmation, his court became “known for its decisions using the idea of substantive due process and liberty of contract to uphold the rights of big business than for its decisions advancing personal liberties.” That said, Fuller was regarded as a skilled and “patient” judicial administrator amidst the almost constant criticism of his court for its decisions (according to Fuller’s Oyez description, “only the Warren Court was the subject of more abuse”).
Some of Fuller’s better-known cases include the controversial Lochner v. New York (which struck down – on the basis of substantive due process – New York’s law making it illegal for bakers to work over a certain number of hours), Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (Fuller authored the majority opinion voiding the national income tax), and United States v. E.C. Knight Co., which limited – under the interstate commerce clause – the scope of the Sherman Antitrust Act that Congress passed to break up unfair monopolies.
By far the most notorious case of the Fuller court came in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that state-mandated segregation laws were not unconstitutional so long as the separate accommodations were “equal” for the “white and colored races,” and which was not reversed until Brown v. Board of Education almost 60 years later. Fuller joined in the majority decision.
Of great relevance this term, Fuller also wrote the dissenting opinion in the 1898 case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. That decision affirmed the citizenship of an individual born in the United States to parents who were not American citizens.
Fuller served on the court for approximately 22 years, and died in office from heart disease in July 1910.
Earlier this month, one of Fuller’s descendants, Robert Fuller (the chief justice’s great great-grandnephew, if you’re curious), was tragically shot to death in his home near Washington, D.C. The story has gotten national attention, partly due to Fuller’s status as a prominent philanthropist. That is not the only time Robert Fuller was in the news, however. When interviewed in 2012, he referred to Plessy v. Ferguson as one of the court’s “self-inflicted wounds,” and acknowledged that “[t]he justice who decided the case was Henry Billings Brown, but my ancestor join[ed] in the majority opinion which established this odious doctrine of ‘separate vs. equal.’”
