Today in Supreme Court History: September 4, 1851

9/4/1851: Justice Levi Woodbury dies.

Justice Levi Woodbury

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

It was common in those days for Protestants to give their children Old Testament names. This is what confused Goebbels in Vonnegut’s Mother Night, who assumed that Abraham Lincoln was Jewish.

[Cal Cetín]

You mean he wasn't?

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/abraham-lincoln-was-a-jew-an-unreal-exclusive/Content?oid=2483323

[Syd Henderson]

It was three years before he noticed he was dead.

[Cal Cetín]

Again with poor Justice Woodbury, the Justice who died *twice*! Once in 1851 and again in 1854. Did anyone talk to him in the intervening three years to find out what the afterlife was like?

See also

https://reason.com/volokh/2020/09/04/today-in-supreme-court-history-september-4-1854/

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Today's Noble Prize for identifying error in the content of Today In Supreme Court History is awarded to Cal Cetin.

Congratulations!

(I suppose I understand why South Texas tolerates this shoddy "scholarship," but Georgetown is a good school that should know and do better. That Prof. Barnett misappropriates Georgetown's franchise by associating it with this level of ignorance is shameful.)

[DaivdBehar]

Artie, nitpicking is in bad faith. It should result in an immediate ruling against the party doing it. The nitpicker should then pay all costs from personal assets.

[DaivdBehar]

We said a dead lawyer saves the economy $5 million every year not alive. A dead Supreme Court Justice probably saves the economy $10 billion every year it is not alive. These are stupidest of the lawyers, who are the stupidest people in this country. Every utterance is idiotic and lawless. Every decision they make is wrong and toxic to our nation.

[F.D. Wolf]

Inspired by this post, I perused some of the writings and speeches of Levi Woodbury, readily available on the web. (Archive.com in particular), As one of a handful of individuals to serve in all three branches of government - Navy and Treasury Secretary, United States Senator from New Hampshire (as well as that state's governor), and U.S. Supreme Court Justice - there is an eclectic mix of technical reports, political speeches, and legal writings.

In November 1850, some 11 months before his death, he served as a delegate at a New Hampshire convention to amend the state constitution (while simultaneous serving as a sitting justice on SCOTUS). Among his speeches that stood out to me were two good ones in favor of repealing the state constitution's requirements that an officeholder own property and repealing the requirement that an officeholder be a Protestant. The latter speech's focus was a defense of Catholics (Woodbury was Protestant), almost as if the whole population was either Protestant or Catholic, not considering an officeholder might fall into another category altogether. (This was, course, before the Fourteenth Amendment and long before that Amendment's "incorporation" upon the states.)

[Dan Schiavetta]

I rarely learn anything from Josh’s “Today in Supreme Court History” posts, mostly because his knowledge is too often superficial, but they do spur me to look things up.