Stephen Johnson Field

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Image:Stephen Johnson Field, photo half length seated, 1875.jpg Stephen Johnson Field (November 4, 1816 – April 9, 1899) was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from May 20, 1863, to December 1, 1897. Prior to this, he was the 5th Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court.

Born in Haddam, Connecticut, he was the sixth of the nine children of David Dudley Field, a Congregationalist minister, and his wife Submit Dickinson. He grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and went to Turkey at thirteen with his sister and her missionary husband. He graduated from Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1837. After studying law in New York City with his brother David Dudley Field, they practiced law together until 1848 when he went west to California in the Gold Rush. There his legal practice boomed and he was the mayor of Marysville. The voters sent him to the California Assembly in 1850, but lost a race the next year for the California Senate. His successful legal practice led to his election to the California Supreme Court in 1857, serving six years.

Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the newly created tenth Supreme Court seat, to achieve both regional balance (he was a Westerner) and political balance (he was a Democrat, but a Unionist one). It would also give the Court someone familiar with real estate and mining issues.

He was a vocal proponent of the substantive due process theory that protected property rights from regulation under the Fourteenth Amendment--as illustrated in his dissents to the Slaughterhouse Cases and Munn v. Illinois. Field's views, which were not so much grounded in the Constitution's text as his views of natural law, were eventually adopted by the court's majority, but only after his death. However, he helped end the income tax (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Company), limit anti-trust law (United States v. E.C. Knight Company), and the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Field's concern for individual rights extended to minorities, writing opinions against California's laws discriminating against the Chinese immigrants to that state.

Field insisted on breaking John Marshall's record of thirty-three years on the court, even though he was not able to handle the workload. His colleagues asked him to resign, but he refused, staying on until 1897. He lived only two years more, dying in Washington, D.C., and buried there in the Rock Creek Cemetery.

There was an assassination attempt on Justice Field by a former associate of his on the California Supreme Court, David S. Terry. Terry was shot and killed by Field's bodyguard. See George C. Gorham, “The Story of the Attempted Assassination of Justice Field by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of California”, Journal of the Supreme Court Historical Society, Volume 30; Issue 2 (2005).

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