David J. Brewer (1837-1910)

David Brewer was born in what is present-day Turkey in January 1837, the son of Christian missionaries. His maternal uncles David Dudley Field and Stephen Field were famous lawyers, the latter of whom was a member of the Supreme Court when Brewer took his seat there. After Yale Law School, Brewer moved to Kansas shortly before the Civil War to practice law. Brewer was a judge for the last 40 years of his life, first in the Supreme Court of Kansas, then as a federal circuit court judge, and, beginning in 1890, in the Supreme Court. Brewer was a devout Christian, penning an opinion in 1892 in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States in which he stated that the United States was a Christian nation. At the same time, as he later wrote in a book titled The United States A Christian Nation (1905), "the government as a legal organization is independent of all religions." Brewer also believed that the Court had a duty to limit unreasonable interferences with "liberty of contract." In 1892, in Budd v. New York, a majority of the Court reaffirmed the Court's decision in Munn v. Illinois, holding constitutional New York’s law regulating rates charged by grain elevators. Brewer dissented, and stated "the paternal theory of government is to me odious." Two years later, in Reagan v. Farmers' Loan and Trust Co., Brewer held impermissible a rate regulation of the Texas Railroad Commission on the ground that the investors were denied a return on their money, thus limiting the effect of Munn. He joined the majority's opinion in Lochner v. New York holding unconstitutional New York's maximum hour law, but also wrote the Court's unanimous opinion sustaining Oregon's maximum hour law regarding women in 1908 in Muller v. Oregon. Brewer wrote the Court's opinion in In re Debs, which allowed a federal injunction to issue against striking employees, thus crippling the labor movement for years. Unlike most members of the Court, Brewer was solicitous of the claims made by Chinese claimants to the federal courts, and to claims made by deported Japanese aliens.

Like many lawyers and judges of the late nineteenth century, Brewer feared mobocracy, and believed the courts had a duty to limit the excesses of majority rule through the exercise of judicial review.

Brewer married Louise Landon in 1861. After her death, he married Emma Mott in 1901. He died on March 28, 1910, still a member of the Supreme Court.

Further reading: Michael J. Broadhead, David J. Brewer: The Life of a Supreme Court Justice, 1837-1910 (1994); Owen M. Fiss, The Fuller Court, 1887-1910 (19??); Steven K. Green, Justice Joseph Josiah Brewer and the "Christian Nation" Maxim, 63 Alb. L. Rev. 427 (1999); J. Gordon Hylton, David Josiah Brewer and the Christian Constitution, 81 Marq. L. Rev. 417 (1998).