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Saturday, November 05, 2005
Ind. Law - Justice Willis Van Devanter featured in Marion paper today
The Columbia Encyclopedia has this entry for Willis Van Devanter:
1859–1941, American jurist, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1910–37), b. Marion, Ind. He practiced law (1881–84) in Indiana and, after he removed to Wyoming, became (1889) chief justice of the Wyoming supreme court. He had a prominent role in Republican party politics and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney General (1897–1903) and U.S. circuit court judge (1905–10). Appointed to the Supreme Court by President Taft, Van Devanter was one of the quartet of conservative justices who opposed most of the New Deal legislation.The Supreme Court Historical Society has this entry, along with a portrait:
WILLIS VAN DEVANTER was born on April 17, 1859, in Marion, Indiana. He received a law degree from the University of Cincinnati Law School in 1881 and joined his father’s law firm in Marion. Three years later, Van Devanter moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory, and established his own practice. Van Devanter served as a member of the commission that revised the statutes of the Wyoming Territory in 1886. In 1887, he served as City Attorney of Cheyenne, and in the following year he was elected to the Territorial Legislature. Van Devanter was only thirty years old when, in 1889, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him Chief Justice of the Wyoming Territorial Supreme Court. After Wyoming was admitted to the Union as the forty-fourth State in 1890, Van Devanter resigned as Chief Justice and returned to private practice. In 1897, President William McKinley appointed him an Assistant Attorney General, assigned to the Interior Department. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in 1903. President William H. Taft nominated Van Devanter to the Supreme Court of the United States on December 12, 1910. The Senate confirmed the appointment three days later. Van Devanter served on the Supreme Court for twenty-six years. He retired on June 2, 1937, and died on February 8, 1941, at the age of eighty-one.Today's Marion Chronicle Tribune has a feature story on Justice Van Devanter, written by David Penticuff. A quote:
"Mr. Justice Van Devanter is a man who plays an important role in the history of the court, though you can't find it adequately reflected in the opinions written by him," [Justice Felix] Frankfurter said, "because he wrote so few. But Van Devanter was a man of great experience. He'd been chief justice of Wyoming. He was then made a circuit judge, a United States circuit judge and a member of the Supreme Court in 1910. He had a clear, lucid mind, the mind, should I say, of a great architect. He was a beautiful draftsman and an inventor of legal techniques who did much to bring about the reforms, which, of course, were effectively accomplished by Taft as chief justice."
Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 5, 2005 10:42 AM
Posted to Indiana Law