James Clark McReynolds (February 3, 1862 †– August 24, 1946) was an American lawyer and judge from Tennessee. He served on the Court from 1914 until his retirement in 1941. McReynolds is best known today for his continued opposition to the domestic policies and personality of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which were widely viewed negatively and contained documented elements of overt anti-Semitism and racism. [2] [3] McReynolds was born in Elkton, Kentucky and practiced law after graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law in Tennessee. He served as Deputy Attorney General of the United States during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt and became known for his expertise in antitrust cases. After taking office in 1913, Wilson appointed McReynolds the first attorney general of his government. Wilson appointed McReynolds to the Supreme Court in 1914 to fill the vacancy that caused the death of Associate Justice Horace Harmon Lurton. But for now, the Court is still divided on this issue. McReynolds was, in the words of Time magazine, “a puritanical anti-Semite brutally sarcastic and incredibly reactionary.” McReynolds was lazy.
He often did not even open the arguments that lawyers had filed to prepare him to hear a case until a few hours before the case was argued, and he often spent only a few hours preparing advisory opinions that would settle all the other courts in the country. McReynolds was angry. He called President Franklin Roosevelt “the son of a crippled bitch. in the White House” and avoided his own nephew after the boy woke him up with jazz music on the radio. McReynolds was a petty tyrant. He ordered his employees never to smoke tobacco, even in their spare time, and dictated where they could live. During his frequent duck hunting trips, Judge McReynolds brought his longtime servant Harry Parker and ordered Parker to wade through icy water to retrieve fallen animals instead of a bird dog. Although the two men often agreed on the Constitution, [Chief Justice] Taft dismissed McReynolds as “reckless to his colleagues and others and contemptuous of all” after serving on the same bench as him. Well, it could happen. I just don`t know what`s on the other judges` agenda.
But it seemed to me that this was not a very controversial subject at the time of my appointment. No one asked me a single question about abortion during my hearings. Later, the opposition became more organized and efficient. When a lawyer appeared in the courtroom, McReynolds reportedly whispered, “I see the woman is back here.” He often left the bench when a lawyer stood up to present a case. [41] He found the wearing of wristwatches by female men and the use of red nail polish by vulgar women. [40] “I`ve been a member of this club for many years, and no one here has ever shown me courtesy, so I don`t intend to show anything else.” The indignant president replied, “Mr. Judge, you would not be a member of this club without your official position. The members of this club have endured your rudeness for years simply because you are a member of the Supreme Court. But I tell you now that the next time there is a complaint against you, you will be suspended from the golf course privileges. [58] Field`s view of the court as an enemy of corporate regulation did not gain prominence until shortly before his death in 1899, and Field would not live long enough to see the decisions of the early twentieth century that eliminated the minimum wage, labor protections, and federal child labor laws. Field, however, has done more justice than any other judge to lay the groundwork for these decisions, and many of them have followed the same fabricated interpretations of the Constitution that once animated Field`s dissent.
McReynolds was secretary to Senator Howell Edmunds Jackson in 1893, who later became an associate judge. He practiced law in Nashville and was an associate professor of commercial, insurance, and business law at Vanderbilt University School of Law for three years.[11] [5] [12] And since the installation of their new judge, Brett Kavanaugh, some liberal groups have questioned whether certain precedents, such as Roe v. Wade on abortion rights, remained. Ask Supreme Court researchers who their least favoured judge is, and it`s almost certain that McReynolds will be on the list. According to Wikipedia, McReynolds would not accept “Jews, drinkers, blacks, women, smokers, married or engaged persons as trainee lawyers.” When Justice Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court, was appointed, McReynolds refused to speak to him for three years. He will treat Judge Benjamin Cardozo and Judge Felix Frankfurter with equal contempt. Any list of terrible Supreme Court justices that doesn`t start with Chief Justice Roger Taney will be inherently controversial. Taney authored what is widely considered the worst decision in Supreme Court history, the pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v.
Sandford. Although Taney was much more moderate on the issue of slavery in his youth – he once called slavery a “visual plague on our national character” and he emancipated his own slaves – his views hardened at his age. In 1857, the same year as Dred Scott, Taney called the abolitionist movement “Nordic aggression.” Five years. A brief statement with four paragraphs. Speaking of court, Wikipedia notes that Moore was the shortest judge of all time at 4 feet 5 inches, which is the only remarkable thing about his tenure. Knox wrote: “In 1946 he [McReynolds] died a very lonely death in a hospital, without a single friend or relative at his bedside. He was buried in Kentucky, but no member of the court attended his funeral, although a court employee traveled to Kentucky for services. [ref. needed] By contrast, as the clerk noted, when McReynolds` old African-American messenger, Harry Parker, died in 1953, five or six judges, including the chief justice, attended his funeral. McReynolds` brother, Robert, visited him in hospital shortly before his death.
Since its own departure, the Court has not had to deal with an important Second Amendment or campaign finance case. But it has repeatedly dealt with cases involving the death penalty and its application. Former Justice John Paul Stevens served for 35 years on the Supreme Court drafting some of the court`s most important decisions. “Being insignificant for a year or two [as a judge], however, is a no-brainer,” wrote David Currie, a law professor at the University of Chicago, but “maintaining an insignificant profile over a period of a decade or more is a high-ranking achievement.” Currie made this observation during a light debate with Professor Frank Easterbrook (now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit) that took place in the pages of the University of Chicago Law Review in 1983. In the two scientists` search for the individual who deserved the title of “Most Insignificant Justice,” one name appeared before anyone else: Gabriel Duvall. And above all, Justice McReynolds was a fanatic. He refused to speak to Judge Louis Brandeis during Brandeis` first three years in court because Brandeis was Jewish, and he prohibited any contact between his associates and Jewish judges Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo. There is no official photograph of the judges for 1924 because the seating plan based on the seniority of the court required McReynolds to sit next to Brandeis, and McReynolds simply refused to be photographed next to his Jewish colleague.
When Brandeis presented his views at conferences, McReynolds simply stood up and left. Duvall`s path to the bank was just as discreet. Raised on the family plantation in Prince George`s County, Maryland, Duvall served indiscriminately during the Revolutionary War.