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Stephen Johnson Field was born into a prominent family in Haddam, Connecticut, on November 4, 1816. He graduated at the top of his class from Williams College in 1837 and studied law in the office of his brother David Dudley Field. The California gold rush enticed Field to travel to California in 1849; instead of mining, however, he turned to law and politics. The following year, Field was elected as a Democrat to the California assembly, where he served one term and was pivotal in codifying civil and criminal procedures. Field soon became one of the most prominent attorneys in California. In 1857 Field was elected to the California Supreme Court and became chief justice there in 1859. Because he was both colorful and dogmatic, Field made numerous enemies as well as friends. In 1863 Congress increased the size of the U.S. Supreme Court with the addition of a tenth seat in an attempt to garner further support in California for the Civil War. Although he was a Democrat, Field was a strong supporter of the Union cause.

President Abraham Lincoln's nomination of Field to the U.S. Supreme Court was promptly confirmed by the Senate. Field continued his interest in politics, making unsuccessful bids for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1880 and 1884. Field would serve on the Supreme Court until December 1897, long enough to set a new record for service. He died in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1899, less than eighteen months after leaving the court.

On the Supreme Court, Field became the most influential justice of the Gilded Age. His constitutional philosophy was derived from precepts of natural law (holding that there were certain eternal principles inherent in the universe and that laws must embody these principles to be regarded as legitimate) and his aversion to special privileges and class legislation, akin to Andrew Jackson's. Field championed a broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, to safeguard inalienable rights that did not expressly appear in the Constitution. A central principle of Field's constitutionalism was an attachment to individual liberty, a concept he defined largely but not exclusively in terms of economic freedom. Like most of his contemporaries on the bench, Field demonstrated little interest in equality as a constitutional norm. For example, he consistently refused to use the Fourteenth Amendment to shield blacks from discrimination by the states. Rather than defer to legislative judgments, Field believed that courts should actively safeguard individual rights, especially property and contractual rights.

An important dimension of Field's individualistic belief was deep hostility to government policies aimed at redistribution. He especially disliked property confiscation, and he played a leading role in persuading the Supreme Court to construe narrowly the power of Congress to confiscate Confederate- owned property after the Civil War. Field similarly sought to circumscribe state regulation of railroad and utility charges, fearing that the exercise of such power might constitute a kind of confiscation of property through the imposition of rates that were too low to support commerce.

Field's disdain for redistributive programs was also evident in his frequent votes to invoke the contract clause to block efforts by local governments to repudiate their bonded debt. The most dramatic sign of Field's anti-redistributive principles was his joining the majority in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co. (1895) to invalidate the 1894 income tax as an unconstitutional direct tax. The basic issue in this case was the legitimacy of using federal taxing authority to alter the market-determined distribution of wealth. Such a levy was odious to Field, who saw it as a form of class legislation. Still, it would be a mistake to caricature Field as a one-sided defender of business interests. He voted to uphold numerous health and safety regulations that were within the scope of traditional state police power. Field was also skeptical of government-conferred monopoly privilege and was sympathetic to the claims of employees injured in industrial accidents.

He was concerned to safeguard what he saw as the natural rights of individuals to follow ordinary avocations. Field contributed significantly to the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, although the Supreme Court never protected property rights and entrepreneurial freedom to the extent he desired. Field had an irascible personality and a tendency to hold grudges that made him a vexing colleague of his fellow justices. By the mid-1890s he had become increasingly feeble and wrote few opinions. He died in 1899 at the age of eighty-four.

References:

1. Ely, James W., Jr. The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888-1910. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

2. Fiss, Owen M. History of the Supreme Court of the United States, Vol. 8: Troubled Beginnings of the Modern State, 1888-1910. New York: Macmillan, 1993.

3. Kens, Paul. Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

4. Swisher, Carl Brent. Stephen J. Field, Craftsman of the Law. 1930. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

5. Urofsky, Melvin I., ed. The Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary. New York: Garland Publishers, 1994.

6. White, G. Edward. The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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