William Woods (1824-1887)

William Woods was born on August 3, 1824 in Ohio. Woods graduated from Yale and then read law in Ohio. He was a Democratic member of the Ohio legislature when the Civil War began in 1861. He was a volunteer in an Ohio regiment as an officer during the War. After the War, Woods moved to Alabama and became a Republican (this would have made him a Carpetbagger in Southern terminology). He served as a judge in equity in Alabama, and was named to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1869 by President Ulysses S. Grant. In 1881, President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated Woods to the Court to replace the departed William Strong.

Woods joined a majority of the Court in refusing to interpret expansively the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1883, Woods joined seven other members of the Court to hold unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the ground that it impermissibly attempted to regulate private action, not merely state action. He also wrote the opinion for the Court declaring unconstitutional the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, because the Act impermissibly permitted the federal government to criminalize conspiracies beyond the constitutionally enumerated powers of Congress. 

Woods died on May 14, 1887.