Pierce Butler (March 17, 1866 – November 16, 1939) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1923 until his death in 1939. He is notable for being the first Supreme Court justice from Minnesota, and for being a Democrat appointed by a Republican president. He was a staunch conservative and was regarded as a part of the Four Horsemen, the conservative bloc that dominated the Supreme Court during the 1930s. A devout Catholic, he was also the sole dissenter in the case Buck v. Bell, though he did not write an opinion.

Early life and education

Butler was born in Northfield, Minnesota, to Patrick and Mary Ann Butler. They left their home in Ireland due to the Great Famine.

Butler graduated from Carleton College in 1887. He received both a degree in the arts and a degree in science. He then read the law for one year before being admitted to the bar in 1888.

thumb|left|175px|Butler in 1897

He was elected as county attorney in Ramsey County in 1892, and re-elected in 1894. Butler joined the law firm of How & Eller in 1896, which became How & Butler after the death of Homer C. Eller the following year. He accepted an offer to practice in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he took care of railroad-related litigation for James J. Hill. He was highly successful in representing railroads.

In 1905 he returned to private practice and rejoined Jared How. He had also served as a lawyer for the company owned by his five brothers. In 1908, Butler was elected President of the Minnesota State Bar Association.

From 1912 to 1922, he worked in railroad law in Canada, alternately representing the shareholders of railroad companies and the Canadian government; he produced favorable results for both. When he was nominated for the United States Supreme Court in 1922, Butler was in the process of winning approximately $12,000,000 for the Toronto Street Railway shareholders.

Supreme Court justice

Nomination and confirmation

thumb|left|upright|Justice Butler circa 1924

On December 5, 1922, Butler was nominated by President Warren G. Harding as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to succeed William R. Day. Butler believed that his fellow Minnesotan, William D. Mitchell, should have been nominated. He exclaimed, “Billie Mitchell, not I, should be named.” Although he was supported by Chief Justice William Howard Taft, Butler's opposition to "radical" and "disloyal" professors at the University of Minnesota (where he had served on the Board of Regents) made him a controversial Supreme Court nominee. Farmer–Labor Senator-elect Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota opposed him, as did the Progressive Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. and took the judicial oath of office on January 2, 1923. During his sixteen years on the bench, Justice Butler authored 327 majority opinions as well as 50 dissenting opinions.

He wrote the majority opinion (6–3) in United States v. Schwimmer, in which the Hungarian immigrant's application for citizenship was denied because of her candid refusal to take an oath to "take up arms" for her adopted country.

In Palko v. Connecticut, Butler was the lone dissenter; the rest of the justices believed that a state was not restrained from trying a man a second time for the same crime. Butler believed this violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

He sided with the majority in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, holding unconstitutional an Oregon state law that prohibited parents from sending their children to private or religious schools. and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s opinion holding that the forced sterilization of an allegedly "feeble-minded" woman in Virginia was constitutional. Holmes believed that Butler's religion influenced his thinking in Buck, remarking that "Butler knows this is good law, I wonder whether he will have the courage to vote with us in spite of his religion." Although Butler dissented in both Buck and Palko, he did not write a dissenting opinion in either case; the practice of a Justice's noting a dissent without opinion was much more common then than it would be in the later 20th and early 21st centuries.

Another consequential dissent was from the opinion expressed in Olmstead v. United States, which upheld federal wiretapping.

Death and legacy

On November 15, 1939, Butler went into a Washington, D.C., hospital for "a minor ailment" but died in the early morning of November 16, at the age of 73 while still on the Court. He was the last serving Supreme Court Justice appointed by President Harding. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery in St. Paul.

The bulk of his and his family's collected papers are with the Minnesota Historical Society. Other papers are collected elsewhere.<!-- Both versions of Empson's book state it is named after Pierce Butler Jr. Removed the citation to historical blog post by Jane McClure. -->

See also

  • List of justices of the Supreme Court of the United States
  • List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 10)
  • List of United States Supreme Court justices by time in office
  • List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Hughes Court
  • List of United States Supreme Court cases by the Taft Court

References

Sources

Further reading

  • Also on Proquest Digital Dissertations. Paper AAI3357971.