David Josiah Brewer was an American jurist and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court for 20 years. Mr. Brewer was one of four justices nominated by President Harrison to the Supreme Court. He served during The Fuller Court.
Background
Mr. Brewer was born on June 20, 1837 in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire (now İzmir, Turkey), to Emilia Field Brewer and Rev. Josiah Brewer who at the time of his birth were running a school for Greeks in Smyrna, Ottoman Empire; Emilia Brewer's brother Stephen Johnson Field, a future Supreme Court colleague of Mr. Brewer, was living with the couple at the time. His parents returned to the United States in 1838 and settled in Connecticut.
Education
When he was 15 years old, David Brewer entered Wesleyan College (later Wesleyan University), where he studied for two years before transferring to Yale, his father’s alma mater. After graduating from Yale in 1856 with Bachelor of Arts degree, he studied law with his prominent New York uncle, David Dudley Field, Jr., followed by a year’s course of study at the Albany Law School. He graduated in 1858 and was thereafter admitted to the New York bar.
Mr. Brewer's uncle, Stephen Field, had been lured west by the California gold rush. David Brewer chose a similar course, though unlike his uncle he actually spent some time prospecting for gold on Pikes Peak before finally settling nearby Leavenworth, Kansas. He was soon working as a notary public and serving on the school board. In 1861 Mr. Brewer undertook the first in a long series of public offices that would occupy his life over the next half century. Initially he accepted an administrative position as commissioner for the federal circuit court in Leavenworth. After two years and a failed bid to obtain a seat in the state legislature, David Brewer was first elected judge for the criminal and probate courts in his county and then, in 1864, elected judge of the First Judicial District Court of Kansas. He briefly left the bench in 1869, after being elected Leavenworth County Attorney. But by 1870 Mr. Brewer had resumed his judicial career, winning election that year to the Kansas Supreme Court and being reelected in 1876 and 1882.
His dissent in State v. Mugler (1883), though, was suggestive of the future course his thinking would take when he argued that Kansas’s Prohibition Amendment, barring most manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages, amounted to an unconstitutional taking of a brewery without just compensation. Brewer phrased his conclusion in this case tentatively; future years would find him more confident in his defense of property rights. Brewer’s years on the Kansas Supreme Court also demonstrated a sensitivity to women’s issues that would exhibit itself when he joined the Supreme Court. In Wright v Moell (1876), he held that a woman elected County Superintendent of Public Instruction could not be deprived of her office because of her sex.
In 1884 President Chester A. Arthur appointed David Brewer to the Eighth Judicial Circuit Court; Mr. Brewer resigned his position on the Kansas Supreme Court to accept this federal appointment. When Associate Justice Stanley Matthews died five years later in the spring of 1889, he was an early candidate to fill the vacant position on the Supreme Court. President Benjamin Harrison soon narrowed the field to two men: Mr. Brewer and Henry Billings Brown, a federal district judge from Michigan and David Brewer’s former Yale classmate. Benjamin Harrison eventually learned that Mr. Brewer had written a letter suggesting that the appointment go to Brown. This apparently gracious act so impressed the president that he nominated David Brewer as associate justice of the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed the appointment on December 18, 1889, by a vote of 53-11.
In the first few weeks of Justice Brewer’s tenure on the Court, he and his colleagues heard arguments in a new case challenging a Granger law. This time, in Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railroad Co. v. Minnesota (1890), a new majority of the Court - including Mr. Brewer held that the due process clause required judicial review of rates set by a state’s Railroad and Warehouse Commission. "Unreasonable" economic regulations offended the due process guarantee, and Chicago, Milwaukee suggested that federal courts were prepared to determine the reasonableness of state economic regulation.
With his colleague, Associate Justice Rufus W. Peckham, David Brewer became a leader of the Court’s conservative block. Over the following decades Mr. Brewer and the other conservatives guided the Court toward an expansive use of constitutional provisions - especially the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments - to defend property rights against a variety of state and federal regulations. He joined with a majority of the Court to reject the federal government’s attempt to regulate manufacturing monopolies in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895), concluding that congressional power to regulate interstate commerce did not include power to regulate manufacturing. Mr. Brewer also joined the majority that declared unconstitutional the federal income tax of 1894 in Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan & Trust Co. (1895), a decision effectively overruled by ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment.
One of his best remembered opinions is In re Debs (1895), which gave Mr. Brewer the opportunity to enhance federal power to secure essentially conservative economic results. Mr. Debs involved the 1894 Pullman strike in which Eugene Debs led a strike against railroads that used Mr. Pullman cars. The federal government eventually obtained injunctions that prohibited certain activities associated with the strike, but Mr. Debs and his associates refused to obey the injunctions. They were arrested, tried for contempt of court, fined, and sent to jail. Debs subsequently petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of habeas corpus ordering his release. Among the lawyers who represented Eugene Debs was one of the most famous advocates of the 20th century: Clarence Darrow. Mr. Debs’s lawyers argued that the injunctions he had violated were themselves illegal and that his trial without a jury for contempt violated his constitutional rights. David Brewer, though, for an unanimous Supreme Court, rejected these arguments, leaving Mr. Debs locked in jail and organized labor dealt a significant defeat.
In addition to his work as a Supreme Court justice, David Brewer lectured and wrote copiously about the law. He taught at Yale and at what became George Washington University.
Justice Brewer has written and spoken at many important centers with a loyalty to Christian principles and a reverent and well-reasoned respect and love for the Bible which have won for him friends and admirers hardly less numerous than those who honor his attainments as a lawyer and a jurist.
Politics
Mr. Brewer was an adherent of the Republican Party of the United States. David Brewer’s judicial temperament, moderately conservative to begin with, became increasingly conservative as he grew older. In his years as a state supreme court judge, he did not exhibit the same vigor in challenging laws that restricted the rights of property owners that he would demonstrate as a Supreme Court justice in the 1890s.
David Brewer sided with an aggressive defense of property rights, making the Court a principal guarantor of laissez-faire capitalism. Mr. Brewer viewed himself as pitted in a great constitutional battle against socialists and other progressive elements who would trample the property rights of individuals. He characterized the Court's decision in the Chicago, Milwaukee case as a strong and unconquerable fortress in the long struggle between individual rights and the public good.
Personality
David Brewer was a vigorous and friendly man, even as he advanced into old age.
Connections
David Josiah Brewer got married to Louise R. Landon on October 3, 1861. However, his wife died in 1898. A few years later Mr. Brewer remarried to Emma Miner Mott.