The Constitutional Class Book: Being a Brief Exposition of the Constitution of the United States; Designed for the Use of the Higher Classes in Common Schools (Classic Reprint)
Commentaries on the law of bills of exchange, foreign and inland, as administered in England and America: with occasional illustrations from the commercial law of the nations of continental Europe.
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Commentaries On Equity Jurisprudence, As Administered in England and America, Volume 1
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Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the ... the Constitution. 3rd Edition. 2 Vols. 1858
Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: with a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States Before the ... by Thomas M. Cooley. 4th Ed. 2 Vols.
Joseph Story was an American lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1811 to 1845. He is most remembered for his opinions in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and The Amistad case, and especially for his magisterial Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, first published in 1833.
Background
Mr. Story was born on September 18, 1779, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, United States; the son of a prominent physician. Joseph Story was the eldest child of his father’s second marriage, to Mehitable Pedrick Story, and the eighth of his father’s total 18 children. His grandfather and his father had modest claims to fame - his grandfather for having served as assistant deputy registrar of the British Vice Admiralty Court in Boston and clerk of the American Navy Board and his father for having participated in the Boston Tea Party.
Education
Educated at a private academy in Marblehead, Joseph Story left the school early, after being disciplined for brawling, and entered Harvard College in 1795. He graduated second in his class from Harvard in 1798 and turned to the study of law, apprenticing himself first with Samuel Seward and later with Samuel Putnam in Salem. He was admitted to the bar in 1801.
In his early years after graduating from Harvard, the law did not claim absolute dominion over Mr. Story’s intellect. He labored at length to establish a reputation as a poet, contributing pieces to local newspapers and crafting a long poem titled The Power of Solitude, which he eventually published in book form in 1805. Whatever pleasure Joseph Story may have achieved by this publication paled in the face of tragedy, however.
The legal practice he began after 1801 also seemed destined at first for failure. Like many lawyers of the time, he combined legal work with political engagement. Owing to his father’s influence, however, Mr. Story inclined to Democratic-Republican politics and thus for a time found himself alienated from opportunities in Federalist-dominated Massachusetts. But 1805, a year of great personal tragedy for the young lawyer, was also a year in which his political and legal fortunes brightened. Increasing Democratic power in Massachusetts spurred the growth of his legal practice and also won him election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He served as a legislative representative from 1805 to 1808. This political experience led to his election to Congress in 1808 to serve out the term of Jacob Crowninshield, who had died in office. With his election to this post, Joseph Story demonstrated - not for the last time - that his Democratic-Republican inclinations were perhaps not so securely fastened to his character as might have been supposed. He earned the ire of party leaders - President Thomas Jefferson in particular - by opposing Mr. Jefferson’s embargo against foreign trade.
The same year that the Court decided Mr. Fletcher, Justice William Cushing died. Joseph Story possessed the experience and Republican credentials necessary to win appointment to the Court as Mr. Cushing’s successor. Nevertheless, he was young for the post - a mere 32 years of age - and, more significantly, had earned the distrust of President Jefferson, who, though no longer president, still dominated party affairs. Mr. Jefferson frankly counseled President James Madison against nominating Joseph Story; Mr. Madison therefore made a diligent effort to find a more suitable candidate. His first and third choices - Levi Lincoln and John Quincy Adams - declined to serve, and his second choice - Alexander Wolcott - failed to receive confirmation by the Senate. Thus, James Madison turned at last to Joseph Story, who chose to relinquish a more lucrative career as an advocate to pursue the vocation of a jurist. By this time he had married Sarah Waldo Wetmore (in August 1808), and he had increasing financial obligations for his family. But Mr. Story’s scholarly inclinations could find no better venue for pursuit than the highest court of the land, and he therefore accepted President Madison’s nomination. The Senate confirmed him to the position of associate justice in November 1811; he took the oath of office on February 3, 1812.
President Jefferson’s premonition concerning Mr. Story’s devotion to Republican principles almost immediately proved itself correct. The new associate justice - confirmed to the Court together with Gabriel Duvall - demonstrated himself, as Mr. Jefferson surmised, only a "pseudo-republican." He quickly aligned himself with the federalism of Joseph Jefferson’s great nemesis, Chief Justice John Marshall, and championed, more than any other justice on the Court, a broad scope of audiority for federal courts. In his zeal for this cause, he even outstripped Mr. Marshall himself at times. Early in his tenure on the Court, Joseph Story launched a campaign to recognize a federal common law of crimes. This issue had been settled shortly after Mr. Story took his seat on the Court in United States v. Hudson & Goodwin (1812), in which the Court denied the power of federal courts to enforce federal common-law - or judge-made - criminal sanctions. But the pseudo-Republican Story refused for a time to accept this decisively Republican holding.
As a circuit judge he insisted that the issue was still open and lobbied his brethren - unsuccessfully, as it turned out - to reconsider Mr. Hudson. What Joseph Story could not accomplish through judicial action, though, he was able to accomplish politically. He drafted a code of federal criminal laws and in 1825, with the legislative assistance of Daniel Webster, saw it enacted by Congress as law.
Mr. Marshall took the lead in authoring most of the Court’s important decisions during this period. But in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816), the chief justice had to recuse himself because he had a financial interest at stake in the case and had been involved in the case as counsel at one point. In this important Federalist triumph, Associate Justice Story stood in for the chief justice, authoring the opinion for a unanimous Court. It was his most significant and most controversial opinion. The case arose from a Virginia statute, passed during the Revolutionary War, that confiscated the property of Loyalists. One such individual, Thomas Lord Fairfax, had willed his substantial properties to a British subject. This inheritance was frustrated by the Virginia law, however, even though the law itself was in conflict with the subsequently ratified Treaty of Paris and Jay Treaty, both of which protected Loyalists from the kind of confiscation the Virginia law had effected. When the Virginia law was challenged before the Supreme Court in Fairfax’s Devisee v. Hunter’s Lessee (1813), the Court, in an opinion by Justice Story, found the Virginia law was superseded by the federal treaties.
The decision played poorly in Virginia, where state’s rights advocates denounced it as an assault on state sovereignty and where the Virginia Supreme Court soberly pronounced itself under no obligation to abide by the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that the section of the 1789 Judiciary Act that authorized the Court to review state court decisions inconsistent with federal laws and treaties was itself unconstitutional. In this posture the case returned again to the Supreme Court as Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, and Justice Story again wrote the majority opinion for the Court. In it, he insisted that the Supreme Court was the final arbiter of questions involving the interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. Thus, just as the Court possessed the power of judicial review over federal laws - the principle announced in Marbury v. Madison (1803) by which the Court was declared the final authority as to whether a law violated the Constitution - so it also possessed this power with respect to state laws that were inconsistent with federal law.
In Swift v. Tyson (1845), he authored the Court’s opinion granting federal courts the ability to apply general commercial principles to resolve cases involving suits between citizens of different states, rather than being bound by the law of a particular state. Joseph Story’s decision in the case would survive until the 20th century, when the Court overturned Swift in Erie Railroad v. Tompkins (1938). More controversially, while acting as a circuit judge, Mr. Story - a longtime foe of slavery - held in United States v. La Jeune Eugenie (1822) that the international slave trade violated the law of nations. His brethren on the Court would not follow him to this controversial conclusion, however, and in The Antelope (1825), Mr. Marshall’s opinion for the Court over-ruled Story’s holding.
Joseph Story served as Chief Justice Marshall’s most vigorous ally on the Court until the summer of 1845.
Joseph Story is most remembered for his opinions in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and The Amistad case, and especially for his magisterial Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, first published in 1833. Dominating the field in the 19th century, this work is a cornerstone of early American jurisprudence. It is the second comprehensive treatise on the provisions of the U. S. Constitution and remains a critical source of historical information about the forming of the American republic and the early struggles to define its law.
Story County, Iowa was named in his honor, as was Story Hall, a dormitory at Harvard Law School, and the DePaul University College of Law chapter of the legal fraternity, Phi Alpha Delta and Story Grammar School, the town of Marblehead's first modern graded school.
Joseph Story opposed Jacksonian democracy, saying it was "oppression" of property rights by republican governments when popular majorities began (in the 1830s) to restrict and erode the property rights of the minority of rich men. R. Kent Newmyer presents Mr. Story as a "Statesman of the Old Republic" who tried to be above democratic politics and to shape the law in accordance with the republicanism of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall and the New England Whigs of the 1820s and 1830s, including Daniel Webster. Historians agree that Justice Joseph Story reshaped American law in a conservative direction that protected property rights.
Mr. Story championed a vision of federal judicial authority that would preside over unified principles of commerce. He denied that federal courts were bound to enforce practices that conflicted with these unified principles.
Views
Quotations:
"Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected. And if these, or either of them, are regulated by no certain laws, and are subject to no certain principles, and are held by no certain tenure, and are redressed, when violated, by no certain remedies, society fails of all its value; and men may as well return to a state of savage and barbarous independence."
"Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them."
"In the next place, the state governments are, by the very theory of the constitution, essential constituent parts of the general government. They can exist without the latter, but the latter cannot exist without them."
"The truth is, that, even with the most secure tenure of office, during good behavior, the danger is not, that the judges will be too firm in resisting public opinion, and in defence of private rights or public liberties; but, that they will be ready to yield themselves to the passions, and politics, and prejudices of the day."
"A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever may be its theory, must, in practice, be a bad government."
"And it is no less true, that personal security and private property rest entirely upon the wisdom, the stability, and the integrity of the courts of justice."
"The constitution of the United States is to receive a reasonable interpretation of its language, and its powers, keeping in view the objects and purposes, for which those powers were conferred. By a reasonable interpretation, we mean, that in case the words are susceptible of two different senses, the one strict, the other more enlarged, that should be adopted, which is most consonant with the apparent objects and intent of the Constitution."
"One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms."
"Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings, and blood of their ancestors; and capacity, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
,
United States
1810
He would later serve as that society's vice-president from 1831 to 1845.
American Antiquarian Society
,
United States
1814
Connections
Near the end of 1804, Mr. Story married Mary Lynde Oliver, a woman who shared a love of poetry with her spouse. But seven months later, he endured his young wife’s untimely death and then, the same year, the death of his father. The grieving Joseph Story promptly turned against his own poetic work, purchasing all the copies of The Power of Solitude he could find and destroying them. In August 1808 he had married Sarah Waldo Wetmore. This union also would know its share of sorrow, as five of the seven children born to the couple died before reaching adulthood.
