George Shiras, Jr.
Photo of George Shiras, Jr.
George Shiras Jr.
George Shiras, Jr.
Portrait of George Shiras, Jr.
Photo of George Shiras, Jr.
George Shiras Jr.
Mr. Shiras was born on January 26, 1832, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, to George Shiras and Eliza Herron Shiras. His father made enough money running a brewery to retire early and devote his energy to farming, especially to the cultivation of peach orchards. The man who would one day occupy a seat on the nation’s highest court thus spent his early years working on the family farm, some 20 miles outside Pittsburgh.
George Shiras Jr. left the farm in 1849 to attend Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. In 1851 he transferred to Yale, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1853. Although Mr. Shiras remained briefly at Yale to study law at law school, he soon chose to pursue a more practical curriculum. He returned to Pittsburgh, where he read law in the office of a former county district court judge, Hopewell Hepburn, and was admitted to the bar of Allegheny County in 1855.
For a few years, George Shiras Jr. practiced with his brother Oliver, a recent Yale Law School graduate, in Dubuque, Iowa. Mr. Shiras exchanged the law partnership with his brother in Dubuque for one in Pittsburgh with his former mentor, Hopewell Hepburn, a partnership that lasted until Mr. Hepburn’s death in 1862. For the next 30 years, George Shiras Jr. practiced law in Pittsburgh. He rode the tide of economic prosperity in Pittsburgh to his own personal prosperity by gradually coming to represent the titans of Pittsburgh’s iron and steel industry, in addition to such prestigious clients as the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. By the end of his third decade of practice in Pittsburgh, Mr. Shiras’s income was estimated at $75,000 per year, an extraordinary sum for the times.
Mr. Shiras’s prominence in the Pennsylvania legal community made it inevitable that he would be considered as a possible political candidate for some significant post. Nevertheless, the same independent spirit that had propelled Mr. Shiras to practice law by himself made him a poor ally for the dominant Pennsylvania Republican machine of his day. Though he was briefly considered as a possible U.S. senator, his refusal to accept this position ultimately alienated him from Pennsylvania Republican leaders such as James Donald Cameron and, later, Matthew Quay. But Mr. Shiras’s independent Republicanism proved attractive to President Benjamin Harrison when Associate Justice Joseph P. Bradley’s death in January 1892 created a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Mr. Harrison had strong political reasons for appointing someone from Pennsylvania to the vacant seat; but less than cordial relationships between the president and the state’s two senators, James Cameron and Matthew Quay, also gave Benjamin Harrison reason to find an independent candidate, not controlled by the Republican machine in Pennsylvania, for the post. Though lacking in both political and judicial experience, George Shiras Jr. was amply supplied in independence of spirit. President Harrison, as if to emphasize Shiras’s independence even further, defied the tradition of senatorial courtesy by failing to consult with Pennsylvania senators Cameron and Quay about his appointment. Thus, when the president sent Shiras’s nomination to the Senate, James Cameron and Matthew Quay initially launched an indignant campaign of opposition to the nomination. Nevertheless, widespread support for George Shiras Jr. soon scuttled their efforts, and the Senate confirmed the new justice’s appointment on July 26, 1892.
Sixty-year-old George Shiras Jr. moved with his wife to Washington, District of Columbia, where he undertook a decade-long tenure of service on the Supreme Court. In spite of bringing no judicial experience with him to the bench, Mr. Shiras proved to be an able judge. He wrote his fair share of opinions, though his concern for the Court’s institutional authority caused him to practice restraint in authoring dissents; he wrote only 14 dissenting opinions in nearly 11 years on the Court. In all, he participated actively in the life of the Court, though he almost never took the center stage occupied by more influential justices of the times.
During his years on the Court, George Shiras Jr. lived a relatively quiet life in Washington with his wife. The couple declined to engage in the rounds of social activities customary for his prominent post. After he had been an associate justice for a little more than 10 years, he kept a longstanding commitment he had made to retire after a decade of service on the Court. Elderly, but still vigorous, he submitted his resignation on February 23, 1903, and he lived another 21 years in retirement.
Mr. Shiras built up a successful career of a lawyer. By the end of the third decade of his practice in Pittsburgh, his income was estimated at $75,000 per year, an extraordinary sum for the times. In 25 years of practice, George Shiras Jr. built up a wide reputation in corporation law. Mr. Shiras was the only Supreme Court justice, as of 2011, to have no record of public (political, governmental or judicial) service.
Mr. Shiras was a Presbyterian.
George Shiras Jr. was a member of the Republican Party of the United States.
Mr. Shiras was noted for his honesty and pragmatism while representing some of the nation's industrial giants. More craftsman than artist, his opinions were generally well respected, even though they seldom touched on the great issues of the day.
George Shiras Jr. married Lillie E. Kennedy in 1857. The couple would eventually have two sons, both lawyers, one a U.S. congressman.
