Today in Supreme Court History: December 23, 1745

12/23/1745: Chief Justice John Jay's birthday.

Chief Justice John Jay

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Some justices are swallowed up by the job. This one was swallowed up by his robe.

[Dilan Esper]

Rehnquist got crap for the stripes, and should have said "you should have seen John Jay's robe!".

[Darth Chocolate]

I went to his high school. Sorta-kinda OK. Though they NEVER told us what Jay was known for.

[Frank Drackman]

A New Yorker, guess he wasn't involved with Slavery, maybe he won't get cancelled, although he was a "Ginger"

[Cal Cetín]

New York was a slave state at the time. I believe they had more slaves than any "Northern" state and took longer to abolish slavery. Also, their gradual-emancipation plan was not always easy to enforce, since masters (despite a law against it) often sold their slaves south to avoid the gradual emancipation.

Now that I'm looking it up, let me see what they say about Jay and slavery. Ooh, looks like he was against it:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/dev/jay/JaySlavery.html

Well, for all the loopholes in the gradual emancipation law, Jay was the one who signed it, and he'd been pressing for a long time before that to get rid of slavery. I imagine he wouldn't have minded signing a stronger law.

And the apple didn't fall far from the tree, since his son William was an abolitionist.

"When honoring William Jay for his anti-slavery labors in 1854, Horace Greeley harked back to the work of John Jay: 'To Chief Justice Jay may be attributed, more than to any other man, the abolition of Negro bondage in this [New York] state.'"

[Cal Cetín]

And recall that he resigned from the U. S. Chief Justiceship to become governor of New York. A good exchange, since unlike as CJ, as governor he could actually do something about slavery. Also, at the time even a Federalist nationalist could prefer a governorship of a state to a high post in the federal government.

[benji]

“Damn John Jay! Damn everyone who won’t damn John Jay!! Damn everyone that won’t put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!!!”

[Cal Cetín]

This is about the treaty, isn't it?

What do you know, I was right:

https://www.nps.gov/articles/backlash-against-jay-s-treaty.htm

[Cal Cetín]

Yes, IIRC the roads weren't as smooth and easily-travelled as today.

Still, having the Justices leave the capital to administer justice in the hinterlands may have had a salutary effect on them. Now that they work in Washington pretty much all the time, they get to breathe too much of that rarefied atmosphere.

[Cal Cetín]

Indeed, sometimes we hear the Supreme Court spoken of as if it were itself the third branch of the federal government, a distinction which actually belongs to the federal judiciary as a whole.

[Cal Cetín]

Yeah, what do they slip into those cocktails, anyway?

Circuit-riding is better than the cocktail circuit.

[Cal Cetín]

It's interesting that the justices were excused from circuit-riding as travel was getting easier.