 Horace
Lurton was born in Kentucky on February 26, 1844, but was raised in
Tennessee by his doctor-Episcopalian priest father and by his mother.
Lurton served in the Confederate Army as a soldier, re-enlisting after
being discharged for being disabled, and escaping from a prisoner-of-war
camp. After he was again captured, he gained his release upon orders of
President Lincoln. After the War, Lurton attended the law school of
Cumberland University, and in 1867, he graduated and entered practice in
Clarksville, Tennessee. Between 1875-78, Lurton served as a chancellor
in equity, and in 1886, he was elected to the Tennessee Supreme Court.
In 1893, President Grover Cleveland nominated Lurton to the United
States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. In 1909, newly elected
President
William
Howard Taft, with whom Lurton had served on the Sixth Circuit,
nominated the Democrat to the Supreme Court. He was 65 was he was
appointed to the Court, the oldest nominee among all appointed Justices.
Lurton wrote no significant opinions during his five years on the Court.
He was a member of the Court when the most notable constitutional law
case was the Shreveport Rate Case, 234 U.S. 342 (1914). The Court held
that an Interstate Commerce Commission (the now-defunct ICC) decision
setting a maximum rate for interstate shipments between Shreveport and
Dallas and declaring that those rates could be no higher than intrastate
rates between Dallas and East Texas (Marshall) did not violate the
commerce clause, because the relation between interstate and intrastate
rates was so intertwined Congress had the authority to regulate
intrastate transportation. Lurton, joined by Mahlon Pitney, dissented.
Additionally, in Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219 (1911), the Court held
unconstitutional as a violation of the 13th Amendment Alabama's attempt
to criminalize the breach of contract when the employer advanced wages
to the employee. This law was adopted in the Jim Crow era to make it
very difficult for black workers to leave their employers, and was held
by the Court to be an impermissible form of peonage (compulsory service
to the creditor to pay off a debt). The dissenters were
Oliver
Wendell Holmes and Lurton.
Lurton died on July 12, 1914. |
