Joseph Story

Joseph Story was the firstborn of eleven children from his father's second marriage, in a Marblehead, Massachusetts household with more ambition in it than the town could hold. His father Elisha, a physician, had ridden with the Sons of Liberty and helped throw tea into Boston Harbor. Story left Marblehead Academy for Harvard at fifteen, read law under two Salem attorneys, and was admitted to the bar in 1801. His first wife, Ruth Ruddock, died in 1805, the year he entered the Massachusetts legislature. He remarried, served a single term in Congress, and by his early thirties had built a reputation as one of the state's sharper legal minds — a country lawyer nobody in Washington had reason to notice yet.

James Madison nominated Story to the Supreme Court in November 1811. He was 32 years and 58 days old, still the youngest person ever named to the Court. He sat for thirty-four years alongside Chief Justice John Marshall, and while Marshall wrote the era's most famous opinions, Story supplied much of its legal machinery: Martin v. Hunter's Lessee, in 1816, established that the Court could review state-court rulings on federal law at all. From 1829 he was also Harvard's first Dane Professor of Law, and in that chair he wrote the books that trained the next two generations of American lawyers — three volumes of Commentaries on the Constitution, then commentaries on conflict of laws, equity, agency, bailments, and partnership, most of them still in print more than a century later.

Story opposed slavery personally and said so. In 1842 he still wrote the Court's opinion in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, striking down a Pennsylvania law that protected free Black residents from being seized as runaways, on the ground that the Constitution's fugitive-slave clause bound every state regardless of its own statutes. He believed the Union's survival depended on honoring that compact, even as he handed slaveholders a stronger tool for reclaiming people by force. The scholarship consumed him at the same rate: he earned roughly ten thousand dollars a year in book royalties against a Supreme Court salary of forty-five hundred, and of the seven children from his second marriage, only two lived to adulthood.

Story's influence outlasted Marshall's in one narrow sense — his textbooks, not the chief justice's opinions, are what actually trained the 19th century's lawyers, and Story County, Iowa still carries his name. Prigg v. Pennsylvania has aged the opposite way: modern historians treat it as one of the clearest cases of a justice's stated conscience overridden by his own reasoning, cited now mainly as a warning about what "following the compact" can produce. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, under a marble likeness his son William Wetmore Story carved after abandoning law himself to become a sculptor.

Joseph Story's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Martin v. Hunter's Lessee case
  Established Supreme Court review of state-court rulings on federal law 1816
• Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States book
  Three volumes — the standard constitutional text for generations 1833
• Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws book
  Founded the field in American legal scholarship 1834
• Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence book
  Two volumes, still cited in the 20th century 1836
• Prigg v. Pennsylvania case
  Upheld federal fugitive-slave enforcement over a state's personal-liberty law 1842

• September 18, 1779 aged 0 Born in Marblehead, Massachusetts
• 1795 aged ~16 Enters Harvard at fifteen
• July 1801 aged 21 Admitted to the Massachusetts bar
• November 18, 1811 aged 32 Confirmed to the Supreme Court at 32 The youngest person ever nominated to the Court.
• 1816 aged ~37 Writes the Court's opinion in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee
• 1829 aged ~50 Becomes Harvard's first Dane Professor of Law
• 1833 aged ~54 Publishes Commentaries on the Constitution
• 1842 aged ~63 Writes the Court's opinion in Prigg v. Pennsylvania
• September 10, 1845 aged 65 Dies in Cambridge, Massachusetts

• John Marshall 1755–1835
  Chief justice who established judicial review and strengthened the Supreme Court and federal government. served under
• James Madison 1751–1836
  Fourth President and Father of the Constitution who co-authored the Federalist Papers. appointed by
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. argued before
• William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879
  Editor of The Liberator and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. denounced by