Rufus Wheeler Peckham was an American lawyer and politician. He served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1895 until 1909.
Background
Mr. Peckham was born on November 8, 1838, in Albany, New York, United States, the second son of Rufus Wheeler Peckham and Isabella Lacey Peckham. His father - a prominent New York lawyer, politician, and eventually a judge - charted a professional career whose details Mr. Peckham would emulate, with startling similarity. His father served as district attorney of Albany County, as judge on the New York Supreme Court, and finally as a justice on the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest judicial tribunal.
Education
Rufus Peckham received his early education at the Albany Boys Academy, followed by private instruction in Philadelphia. He then read law in his father’s law firm and gained admittance to the New York bar in 1859. By the time he started practice, his father had taken a seat on the New York Supreme Court.
Career
Mr. Peckham spent a decade representing a variety of railroad and commercial interests before he followed in his father’s political footsteps by winning election as district attorney for Albany County in 1869, a position he held for three years.
After his stint as district attorney, Mr. Peckham resumed private practice for nearly a decade. In 1881, though, he returned to the political arena by becoming corporate counsel for the city of Albany, New York. He held this position until 1883, but his real ambition seems to have been to find a judicial career. He made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for a seat on the New York Court of Appeals in 1882, but he followed this effort the next year with a successful campaign to gain a seat on the New York Supreme Court. Three years later he attempted again to win a seat on the more prestigious Court of Appeals. This time Rufus Peckham won election in 1886 to the very seat that his father had held 13 years earlier on the same court before being lost at sea while on a vacation voyage. His election to the New York Court of Appeals was alone an achievement worthy of crowning a legal career, since it was one of the most prestigious state courts in the nation. Here, for a decade, Mr. Peckham labored and revealed in his opinions the conservative bent that would characterize his later service on an even higher court.
Rufus Peckham eventually found himself nominated as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1896, but the sequence of events that placed him in this position comprised a tangle of political circumstances. In the summer of 1893, Justice Samuel Blatchford died, leaving a vacancy on the Supreme Court that President Grover Cleveland tried originally to fill with a New Yorker, since Mr. Blatchford himself had been from New York. But President Cleveland immediately clashed with New York’s senior senator, David B. Hill, who had long been politically at odds with the president and who invoked the principle of senatorial courtesy to defeat the president’s first two nominations to fill the vacancy left by Mr. Blatchford’s death.
Thus, the Senate rejected William B. Hornblower and Wheeler Peckham, both prominent New York lawyers who were nevertheless unacceptable to Senator Hill because both had been involved in the investigation of one of Mr. Hill’s political allies for election tampering. Wheeler Peckham was Rufus Peckham’s older brother and a man whose standing in the New York legal community was reflected in his chairmanship of the New York State Bar Association. During the confirmation battles over Hornblower and Wheeler Peckham, Senator Hill was reported to have announced that he would have voted to confirm an appointment of "the other Peckham" - that is, Rufus Peckham. But President Cleveland had wearied of confirmation fights, and he eventually settled on the nomination of Senator Edward White from Louisiana for associate justice of the Supreme Court. Mr. White, quite popular among his senatorial colleagues, easily won confirmation and the matter was settled.
In 1895, though, the death of Justice Howell E. Jackson created another vacancy on the high court, and once again President Cleveland attempted to fill this seat with a New Yorker. Mr. Cleveland was willing to defy Senator Hill and consulted with William Hornblower about accepting a renewed nomination to the Court, but Mr. Hornblower declined, as did Frederic Coudert, another New York lawyer approached by the president. Finally, President Cleveland recalled David Hill’s earlier comment about Rufus Peckham and inquired by letter whether the senator still viewed Mr. Peckham as an acceptable choice for the Court. Mr. Hill had no complaint, and the president therefore submitted Rufus Peckham’s name to the Senate in December 1895. The Senate moved quickly to confirm the appointment, and Rufus Peckham took the oath of his new office in January 1896. He seems not to have originally viewed the appointment as an unmitigated blessing, apparently because he found life as an appellate judge somewhat too cloistered for his taste. He remarked of his appointment to a friend, "If I have got to be put away on the shelf I suppose I might as well be on the top shelf."
Mr. Peckham was basically a conservative justice who was noted for his careful and lucidly reasoned opinions. He is best known for the majority opinion he wrote in Lochner v. New York (1905), a case in which a baker had contracted with his employees for longer than a 10-hour working day in defiance of a state law setting 10 hours a day as the legal maximum. He wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the states from curtailing a man’s liberty to make his own economic arrangements with his employees. This decision drew a stinging rebuke from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in a memorable dissent. By the 1930s Mr. Holmes’s opinion had become the prevailing interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and legislation such as maximum-hours laws was held to be constitutional.
Rufus Peckham served on the Court until October 24, 1909, writing 303 opinions and dissenting only nine times.
Rufus Peckham was an outstanding lawyer and politician. His most famous opinion was in Lochner v. New York (1905), in which the Court invalidated a limitation on bakers' working hours to sixty per week as being contrary to the individual right to freely contract, and as being unnecessary to protect health or safety. Rufus Peckham is well-known for his expansive interpretation of the Sherman antitrust law, in which he saw the goal of protecting consumer welfare.
Politics
Mr. Peckham was active in local Democratic politics. He was known for his strong use of a substantive due process to invalidate regulations of business and property.
Connections
Rufus Peckham married Harriette Arnold on November 14, 1866.
