Today in Supreme Court History: December 1, 1897

12/1/1897: Justice Stephen Field resigns.

Justice Stephen Field

Comments

[Queen Amalthea]

"'Field was one of the pioneers of the concept (beloved by many libertarian legal thinkers) of substantive due process – the notion that the due process protected by the Fourteenth Amendment applied not merely to procedures but to the substance of laws as well.'...In both Munn v. Illinois and Mugler v. Kansas, Justice Field based his dissent on the protection of property interests by the Due Process clause."

OK...

"He also joined the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson that upheld racial segregation. Field dissented in the landmark case Strauder v. West Virginia, where the majority opinion held that the exclusion of African-Americans from juries violated the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause....as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, he penned opinions infused with racist anti-Chinese-American rhetoric, most notably in his majority opinion in The Chinese Exclusion Case, Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581 (1889), and in his dissent in Chew Heong v. United States."

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

[Krychek_2]

I've noticed the tendency on the part of some libertarians to think that property rights and gun rights are the only rights.

[Libertymike]

Examples?

Field, though far from the ideal defender of all natural rights, at least penned an awesome dissent in the Slaughterhouse cases. It is a dissent far better composed, far more rooted in first principles, and far more moored to reality than Holmes' Lochner dissent.

[Queen Amalthea]

As to Fields my original comment had several examples.

[Krychek_2]

Libertymike, there are a great many things you can do with your property that are not, technically speaking, either fraudulent or the initiation of force, but which nevertheless do harm to other people. For example, if my next door neighbor is using his property as a toxic waste dump, such that the rest of the neighborhood is getting cancer and having trouble breathing and the water is no longer fit to drink, he's not initiating force and he's not committing fraud. So the traditional libertarian approach would be to say it's not the state's concern. I guess I can sue him if I can prove that my cancer originated from his toxic waste dump, but I'd really rather not get cancer in the first place.

I will acknowledge that individuals have rights; but will you acknowledge that the community has rights too? And that is really where I split from libertarianism. I do have some tendencies in the direction of libertarianism, but ultimately the community has rights too.

[Libertymike]

Your neighbor's use of his yard as a toxic waste dump is, in my conception of libertarianism, an initiation of force that has resulted in damage to people in the neighborhood.

To be sure, we probably part ways on who has the right to seek redress against the neighbor; for you, it is the community; for me, it is the individuals in the community who have sustained injury due to your neighbor's negligent use of his yard.

Those who cause harm to others by their acts of commission or omission should be held to account, including judges, cops, bureaucrats, insurance companies, banks, the military, and pharmaceutical companies.

[Krychek_2]

All right, on that one we may not be that far off. As a practical matter, there are some things done more efficiently by the community than by individuals. And I'm also in favor of preventative measures to keep harm from happening; suing after the fact seems a poor alternative to preventing the harm in the first place.

And all of that depends on how high the stakes are. I think that efficiency can trump liberty if the efficiency value is high and the loss to liberty is low, although reasonable minds may not always agree as to where that tipping point is.

[Bob from Ohio]

"property rights and gun rights are the only rights"

cough, drug laws.

[Queen Amalthea]

Lol, lip service doesn't count.

[Bob from Ohio]

Libertarians only have words. You discount even that.

[Queen Amalthea]

When they don't mean them, yeah.

[Bob from Ohio]

"I am Jack's complete lack of surprise."

Yes, quite surprising that someone who was born in 1816 was a racist. Totally unknown behavior.

He lived in California which explains the anti-Chinese form of racism.

What is surprising is you believe his racist views have any influence on people in 2021.

[Syd Henderson]

He also went the other way sometimes: "Serving as an individual jurist in district court, he notably struck down the so-called 'Pigtail Ordinance' in 1879, which was regarded as discriminating against Chinese, making him unpopular with the Californian public. In his 1884 district court ruling, In re Look Tin Sing, he declared that children born in U.S. jurisdictions are U.S. citizens regardless of ancestry."--Wikipedia

[Queen Amalthea]

It's not his racism but his philosophical selectivity and/or obtuseness which I was commenting on. Funny you went defensive about race right away, sensitive about that Bob?

"What is surprising is you believe his racist views have any influence on people in 2021."

Indeed, the past doesn't influence the present at all. We all know racism wasn't a big deal and then MLK gave a speech condemning affirmative action and all but a handful of people realized racism was wrong and junked it.

[Bob from Ohio]

Obscure dead 19th century judges don't "influence the present at all", yes.

[Libertymike]

I have cited him in a couple of briefs, one of which was in defense of a medical doctor being harassed by the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine.

The administrative magistrate dismissed two of the Board's counts against the doc on due process grounds. I was co-counsel with two lawyers from a high falutin down town law firm, heavy on the Ivies, who thought I was nuts to invoke a due process defense to the all-purpose charge that the doc was acting such as to undermine the medical profession in the eyes of the public where the practice in question was neither against the law nor proscribed by any rule of the Board.

[Queen Amalthea]

Edmund Burke: "'Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn.'"

But Bob, like most modern conservatives, gets his conservatism more from Limbaugh and Beck than Burke.

[Bob from Ohio]

Burke was a Whig.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Like Douglas, he broke an existing longest-ever service on the Court record, was a frustrated politician who lost interest in his job, and stayed on after he could no longer do it.

[F.D. Wolf]

Stephen Field became Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court in 1859 after his predecessor David S. Terry after shot and killed U.S. Senator David Broderick in a duel. At Terry's murder trial, none of the state's witnesses had arrived after a rushed jury selection, so the trial judge ordered the jury to return a verdict of not guilty, which it did.

Terry and Field would cross paths again 30 years later, when Field, as circuit justice, ruled against Terry's wife in a sensational case, essentially negating a state court decision that had awarded her a large sum. Terry, who had threatened and attacked court personnel throughout the trial was found in contempt by Field and sentenced to six months, which Terry served in their entirety. Terry threatened to horsewhip Field if he ever got out.

On August 14, 1889, Terry confronted Field on a train platform and was shot and killed by U.S. Marshall David Neagle, who had been assigned to protect Field. Both Field and Neagle were arrested for murder, though Field was later released. A federal habeas petition was filed on Neagle's behalf and was granted. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-2 (with Field recused) that Neagle was acting in the course of his duty, though no specific statute allowed for marshall's being assigned to protect judges, and was not subject to being tried under state law (in essence, creating a "necessary and proper" clause for the executive branch).

[ducksalad]

Sorry for the interruption....testing some tags

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