Morrison Waite
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| Morrison Remick Waite
<tr style="text-align: center;"><td colspan="2">Image:Chief Justice Morrison Waite.jpg | |
| Born | November 29, 1816 Lyme, Connecticut <tr><th>Died</th><td>March 23, 1888 |
|---|---|
Morrison Remick Waite (November 29, 1816 – March 23, 1888) was the Chief Justice of the United States from 1874 to 1888.
He was born at Lyme, Connecticut, the son of Henry Matson Waite, who was a judge of the Superior Court and associate judge of the Supreme Court of Connecticut in 1834-1854 and chief justice of the latter in 1854-1857.
He graduated from Yale as a member of the Skull and Bones Society in 1837, and soon afterwards moved to Maumee, Ohio, where he studied law in the office of Samuel L. Young and was admitted to the bar in 1839. In 1850, he moved to Toledo, and he soon came to be recognized as a leader of the state bar. In politics, he was first a Whig and later a Republican, and, in 1849-1850, he was a member of the Ohio Senate. In 1871, with William M. Evarts and Caleb Cushing, he represented the United States as counsel before the Alabama Tribunal at Geneva, and, in 1874, he presided over the Ohio constitutional convention. In the same year he was appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant to succeed Judge Salmon P. Chase as Chief Justice of the United States, and he held this position until his death at Washington, D.C..
In the cases which grew out of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and especially in those which involved the interpretation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, he sympathized with the general tendency of the court to restrict the further extension of the powers of the Federal government. In a particularly disturbing ruling in United States v. Cruikshank, he struck down the Enforcement Act, ruling that "The very highest duty of the States, when they entered into the Union under the Constitution, was to protect all persons within their boundaries in the enjoyment of these 'unalienable rights with which they were endowed by their Creator.' Sovereignty, for this purpose, rests alone with the States. It is no more the duty or within the power of the United States to punish for a conspiracy to falsely imprison or murder within a State, than it would be to punish for false imprisonment or murder itself." The ruling completely ignored the text and intent of the Fourteenth Amendment, and helped extend the Jim Crow era.
He concurred with the majority in the Head Money Cases (1884), the Ku-Klux Case (United States v. Harris, 1883), the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and the Legal Tender Case (Juillard v. Greenman) (1883). Among his own most important decisions were those in the Enforcement Act Cases (1875), the Sinking Fund Cases (1878), the Railroad Commission Cases (1886) and the Telephone Cases (1887).
There is reason to believe that Justice Waite was not highly regarded by every one. One quote, attributed to one of his brother Justices, call him "an experiment no President has a right to make with our Court."
David C. Korten's "Life After Capitalism," [1] cites the ruling of Waite as the point at which corporations achieved personhood. Key passages cited on p.185 of The Post-Corporate World are:
Text of the 1886 Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, which gave corporations the same rights as people based on the 14th amendment to the Constitution. (decision) [2] (p.185/294)
MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WAITE said: The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.
The summary record includes the Court's findings that:
The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Korten then observes, "Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history."(p.185) He goes on to point out the legal contradiction implicit in corporate personhood. A corporation is the property of it shareholders. But it is also a legal person (technically, a "legal subordinate fiction"). With such "persons" being owned by others, a condition of slavery exists which is prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
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- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
| Preceded by: Salmon P. Chase | Chief Justice of the United States March 4, 1874 – March 23, 1888 | Succeeded by: Melville Fuller |
| Chief Justices of the United States of America
<td style="vertical-align: middle; width: 1px" rowspan="2"> Image:Seal of the United States Supreme Court.png </td> |
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| Jay • Rutledge • Ellsworth • Marshall • Taney • Chase • Waite • Fuller • White Taft • Hughes • Stone • Vinson • Warren • Burger • Rehnquist • Roberts |
| The Waite Court | Image:Seal of the United States Supreme Court.png | |
|---|---|---|
| 1874–1877: | N. Clifford | N.H. Swayne | S.F. Miller | D. Davis | S.J. Field | Wm. Strong | J.P. Bradley | W. Hunt | |
| 1877–1880: | N. Clifford | N.H. Swayne | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | Wm. Strong | J.P. Bradley | W. Hunt | J.M. Harlan | |
| 1881: | N. Clifford | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | J.P. Bradley | W. Hunt | J.M. Harlan | Wm. B. Woods | Th. S. Matthews | |
| 1882–1887: | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | J.P. Bradley | J.M. Harlan | Wm. B. Woods | Th. S. Matthews | H. Gray | S. Blatchford | |
| 1888: | S.F. Miller | S.J. Field | J.P. Bradley | J.M. Harlan | Th. S. Matthews | H. Gray | S. Blatchford | L.Q.C. Lamar II | |
</center>de:Morrison R. Waite pt:Morrison Waite
