A fast be aware for these questioning in regards to the order of our weekly justice bios: We initially deliberate to cowl each chief justice, together with lots of the extra recognizable affiliate justices, however, primarily based on readers’ strategies, have concluded that each justice deserves a better look (in spite of everything, there have solely been 116 of them!). So we’re doubling again and beginning with the primary court docket. Certainly, with the nation marking its 250th birthday on Saturday, there could also be no higher place to start out than with a person who helped ratify the Structure and served as one of many court docket’s six inaugural members.
Justice William Cushing was nearly chief justice. President George Washington nominated him for the court docket’s middle chair in 1796, and the Senate confirmed him unanimously. However after a couple of week, Cushing withdrew his acceptance, citing his declining well being, and resumed his seat as an affiliate justice. Though the long-accepted story is that he merely declined the function, one study from the mid-2000s contends the court docket’s personal minutes present Cushing really served as chief justice for a day or two earlier than deciding to step down (and that he due to this fact belongs on the official roster between John Rutledge and Oliver Ellsworth).
Cushing was born in March 1732, in Scituate, Massachusetts, right into a household the place each his father and grandfather had served as superior court docket judges. He graduated from Harvard Faculty in 1751, taught faculty for a 12 months, and was admitted to observe legislation in 1755. Round 1760 he moved to the frontier of what’s now Maine, turning into the primary probate decide of Lincoln County at 28 and, for a time, the only trained lawyer within the territory.
In 1772 he succeeded his father on the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature. By 1777, Cushing had change into the state’s chief justice, a place he held for 12 years. He then helped frame the Massachusetts Structure and, in 1788, helped ratify the U.S. Structure as his state conference’s vice chairman, working most of its classes when John Hancock fell in poor health.
Cushing’s most important work on the state bench got here within the 1783 prosecution of Nathaniel Jennison, the ultimate case in a trio of disputes over Quock Walker, an enslaved man who sued Jennison after being tracked down and overwhelmed. Cushing declared slavery incompatible with the brand new state structure, reasoning that “there may be no such factor as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, until his liberty is forfeited by some felony conduct or given up by private consent or contract.” The ruling ended slavery as a authorized observe in Massachusetts. Throughout Shays’ Rebellion three years later, Cushing helped preserve order, retaining the courts open at private danger and was later chosen to sentence the rioters.
Washington nominated Cushing to the Supreme Courtroom in September 1789, the Senate confirmed him two days later, and he took his seat as one of the original six justices in February 1790. Over 20 years he delivered solely 19 opinions, and variety of them had been fairly temporary – his shortest opinion ran solely two sentences, and he was identified for his withdrawn manner. He agreed together with his colleagues in every case. Maybe Cushing’s most notable votes got here in 1793’s Chisholm v. Georgia, the place the court docket allowed a citizen of 1 state to sue different states in federal court docket (though this was soon undone by the eleventh Modification, which prevented federal jurisdiction in circumstances “in opposition to one of many United States by Residents of one other State”).
In 1793, Cushing turned the first justice to administer the presidential oath, swearing in Washington for his second time period in Philadelphia (for his first time period, state decide Robert Livingston swore him in). Like his colleagues, Cushing additionally rode circuit, making the twice-yearly treks throughout the nation; he wrote to Washington of journeying via snow, and the burden solely got worse as he grew older.
Cushing remained on the court docket till his death in September 1810, on the age of 78 whereas in his hometown of Scituate. His seat ultimately went to Joseph Story, whom President James Madison nominated in November 1811. (Confirmed at 32, Story turned the youngest justice within the court docket’s historical past.) Cushing was Washington’s longest-serving appointee and the one one of many unique six to sit down underneath both Chief Justices John Jay and John Marshall, making him the “only human bridge” between the court docket’s first decade and the Marshall period.