Subject: John Marshall Harlan
SCOTUS justice 1877-1911. Born into a "prominent slaveholding family", but fought for the Union when the time came.

Quotes from his Wikipedia entry:

Harlan greatly enjoyed his time as a justice, serving until his death in 1911. From the start, he established good relationships with his fellow justices and he was close friends with a number of them. Though Harlan often disagreed with the other justices, occasionally quite vociferously, he was able to separate differences over legal matters from personal relationship. During his tenure, money problems continually plagued him, particularly as he began to put his three sons through college. Debt was a constant concern, and in the early 1880s, he considered resigning from the Court and returning to private practice. He ultimately decided to remain on the Court, but supplemented his income by teaching constitutional law at the Columbian Law School

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Though Harlan believed the Court had the power to review state and federal actions on a broad array of topics, he tended to oppose judicial activism in favor of deference to legislatures

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Harlan, the lone dissenting justice, strongly disapproved of the majority opinion (in Plessy v Ferguson, the seminal separate-but-equal Jim Crow case), writing that "the judgement this day rendered, will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case." He accepted the appellant's argument that the Thirteenth Amendment barred segregation in public accommodations, as he believed that segregation imposed "badges of slavery or servitude" upon African Americans. He also accepted the appellant's argument that the segregation in public accommodations violated the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis that these accommodations constituted "public highway[s]." He further wrote that "our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens."

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Harlan, who suffered from financial problems throughout his tenure on the Court, left minimal assets for the support of his widow, Malvina Shanklin Harlan, and two unmarried daughters.

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Their eldest son, Richard, became a Presbyterian minister and served as president of Lake Forest College. Their second son, James S. Harlan, practiced in Chicago and served as attorney general of Puerto Rico and chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Their youngest son, John Maynard Harlan, also practiced in Chicago and served as an alderman. John Maynard's son, John Marshall Harlan II, served as a Supreme Court Associate Justice from 1955 until 1971

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Harlan was largely forgotten in the decades after his death, but his reputation began to improve in the mid-twentieth century, and many scholars now consider him to be one of the greatest Supreme Court justices of his era. He is most known for his reputation as the "Great Dissenter," and he is especially remembered for his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. Historian D. Grier Stephenson writes that "more than any justice with whom he served, Harlan understood the Reconstruction Amendments to establish a nationally protected right against racial discrimination, although it is a measure of the Court that he frequently articulated those promises in dissent." Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz writes that "Harlan's key dissents have generally been affirmed in the court of history. A century later, his rejection of the narrow view toward civil rights adopted by the Court majority has been generally approved."

To paraphrase B Franklin: sounds like this fella was given a Republic, and tried to keep it. (While at the same time raising accomplished children, and somehow doing all of this without free motorhomes or yacht trips.)

--sutton
remembering when there were expectations of behavior


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