John William Kephart was born on November 12, 1872 in Wilmore, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the fourth son and fourth of five children of Samuel and Henrietta (Wolfe) Kephart and a descendant of John Kephart, who came in 1750 from the Upper Rhineland to Berks County, Pennsylvania. His father, a Civil War veteran, was an itinerant country storekeeper. He died in 1874.
In 1877 Kephart was placed in the Soldiers Orphans School in McAllisterville, Pennsylvania. After graduating in 1889 as valedictorian of his class, he worked briefly as timekeeper with a construction gang and then as a telegrapher for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He enrolled in 1890 at Allegheny College, but lack of funds forced him to withdraw after two terms and return to the railroad. Impressed by his industry, interested officials in the company arranged a work schedule that permitted him to attend Dickinson Law School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He graduated there in 1894.
About 1864 Kephart opened the law practice in Ebensburg, Cambria County, and was soon retained by the Pennsylvania Railroad as its county attorney. In 1906 he became Cambria County solicitor, a position he held for eight years. In 1913 he decided to seek election to the county court but, failing to win the endorsement of the local Republican party, ran instead as an independent candidate for the state superior court. He used the novel technique of sending a personal message by postcard to every registered voter in the state, and was elected to one of the two vacant seats, having finished second in a field of four. In 1918, this time with Republican support, Kephart won election to the Pennsylvania supreme court. Of the 1, 100 opinions he wrote on this bench, a few became well known. His dissent in Mahon v. Pennsylvania Coal Company, on the limits of a state's power to appropriate private property, without compensation, under the police power, was adopted by the United States Supreme Court; it was subsequently cited as precedent to demonstrate that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposes the same obligations on the states as the Fifth Amendment does on the federal government.
Kephart wrote the basic decision allowing appeals from rulings of such state administrative agencies as the Public Service Commission, In re Relief Electric Light, Heat, and Power Company's Petition. He also wrote the leading Pennsylvania decision upholding the rights of peaceful picketing in labor disputes, Jefferson and Indiana Coal Company v. Marks, and extended the liability of employers under the Pennsylvania workmen's compensation act.
Kephart's proven abilities as a vote-getter led to Republican proposals that he run for the United States Senate in 1928 and 1940 and for governor in 1931, but he declined all such bids. In 1933 he came under criticism for allegedly purchasing stock through J. Pierpont Morgan at a price below the market. In what was widely regarded as a political move, Governor Gifford Pinchot called for his resignation. Kephart remained on the court, and in 1936 became through seniority the chief justice.
After his retirement in 1940, Kephart practiced law with his sons (who later formed the leading Philadelphia firm of Stassen and Kephart) and served as special counsel to the Pennsylvania Railroad and to Denis Cardinal Dougherty, Roman Catholic archbishop of Philadelphia. He also participated in the campaign to nominate Wendell Willkie as Republican candidate for the presidency. He died at the age of seventy-one in his rooms in the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia from second-degree burns suffered when he inadvertently scalded himself while taking a shower.
Kephart was well regarded for his service in the judicial system of the United States. During his tenure in the court, he heard some three thousand cases and wrote over four hundred opinions. He also pushed through the state legislature a statute (1937) giving the court authority to prescribe by general rule the practice and procedure in civil actions of the state's trial courts.
Kephart was a Lutheran.
On December 1, 1904, Kephart married Florence May Evans, daughter of Alvin Evans, a local lawyer, bank president, and Republican Congressman. They had three children: Alvin Evans, Henrietta, and John William.
