Henry Billings Brown (1836-1913)

Henry Billings Brown was born in Massachusetts in March 1836. His father was a successful businessman. Brown graduated from Yale University. Like most other lawyers during the antebellum era, he did not receive a law degree, although, unlike most other lawyers of that time, he learned some law at both Yale and Harvard. Shortly before the Civil War commenced, Brown moved to Michigan and began practicing law. After marrying well and successfully practicing law, Brown was appointed to the federal district court in 1875. Fifteen years later, after the death of Samuel Miller, Brown was nominated to the Supreme Court. He took the oath of office on January 5, 1891. Brown showed his interest in protecting property rights shortly after joining the Court. In Budd v. New York, which upheld a broad use of the state's police power in regulating private property, Brown joined the dissenting opinion of David Brewer, which asserted a much greater authority by the judiciary to condemn state regulation of private property. In 1905, in Lochner v. New York, Brown concurred in the holding that the maximum hour law for bakery employees was unconstitutional. Brown may be best known for an opinion that is now reviled: he wrote the majority's opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted states to segregate train accommodations, as long as they were "separate but equal". This permitted southern states to implement "Jim Crow" laws, which subjected black Americans to second-class status based on the fiction of separate but equal, which lasted in law until the Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown, like his fellow Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and a number of other social elites of that time, was a social Darwinist, and his views of women and minorities were at best, crabbed and at worst, racist. He was personable to others, but often depressed.

Brown retired from the Court in 1906. He died in September 1913.

Further reading: Robert Jerome Glennon, Jr., Justice Henry Billings Brown: Values in Tension, 44 U. Colo. L. Rev. 553 (1973); Memoir of Henry Billings Brown