If approved by the Senate, U.S. Circuit Court Judge Brett Michael Kavanaugh will be the first U.S. Supreme Court justice from Washington, D.C.
Thirty-one states have sent justices to the highest court. New York has had 16, followed by Massachusettss and Ohio with nine each, and Virginia with eight.
Six justices have called Pennsylvania home, three of whom had a strong connection to Pittsburgh. The six were James Wilson of Reading (1789-1798); Henry Baldwin of Pittsburgh (1830-1844); Robert Cooper Grier of Carlisle (1846-1870); William Strong of Reading (1870-1880); George Shiras Jr. of Pittsburgh (1892-1903); and Owen Josephus Roberts of Philadelphia (1930-1945).
The justices with Pittsburgh connections were not without their shortcomings.
Justice Baldwin, a native of Connecticut, attended Yale University before moving to Pittsburgh, where he became a prominent member of the Pittsburgh Bar Association and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He was 50 when President Andrew Jackson nominated him.
History remembers him as an opponent of slavery — he called it “abhorrent to all our ideas of natural right and justice” — yet he maintained that it was the law of the land and was the sole dissenter in United States v. The Amistad, the famous Supreme Court case freeing more than 30 kidnapped Africans in 1841.
Despite his opinion that, under the U.S. Constitution, slaves were property, not people, Justice Baldwin was highly regarded in Western Pennsylvania, where a township and a borough are named after him.
Justice Grier was a native of Cumberland County in south-central Pennsylvania, where he graduated from Dickinson College. According to the college’s archives, he was a staunch supporter of President Andrew Jackson and in 1833 was awarded “a patronage appointment to a judgeship on the Pennsylvania state District Court for Allegheny County, newly created for him. He served there for 13 years, developing a reputation for competence.”
In a time when the home state of a nominee carried more weight, Judge Grier, then 52, was tapped by President James K. Polk to succeed Justice Baldwin, his fellow Pennsylvanian, who had died in 1844.
Justice Grier was involved in a number of landmark cases — he served through the tenure of eight presidents — but perhaps none was more infamous than the Dred Scott decision in 1857.
Mr. Scott was a slave whose owner had taken him from a slave state, Missouri, to a free state, Illinois, and then to a free territory, Wisconsin. His owner then moved back to Missouri and died, and Mr. Scott petitioned to be freed, saying he had previously lived in a state and territory that prohibited slavery.
But the court ruled against him and went even further by holding that African-Americans were not citizens of the United States. Some court scholars consider the decision to be the worst ever by the Supreme Court.
“As the only northern justice to concur with the majority in this case and [because of Grier’s] adamant support of fugitive slave laws, he was bitterly denounced by abolitionists,” the Dickinson archives say. “He was also accused of engaging in unethical behavior, as a result of intimate correspondence concerning pending legal matters with incoming President James Buchanan, throughout the duration of the Dred Scott case.
“Happily for his place in history, his service on the court over the next decade was unmarked by further stain. On the outbreak of the Civil War, though still a Democrat, he became a staunch supporter of the Union” and cast the deciding vote upholding President Abraham Lincoln’s blockade of southern ports.
Justice Shiras, who was born 22 miles from Pittsburgh, attended Yale and moved back to the city, where he became a prominent attorney representing industrial companies and railroads during the Second Industrial Revolution, according to the History Central website. He was 60 when he was nominated by President Benjamin Harrison. With a career in private law, he had never been a judge, making him “the only Supreme Court Justice to have no prior judicial or political experience.”
His term on the court was marked by the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which Justice Shiras voted with the majority upholding the “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation.
In 1903, he kept his pledge to retire from the court after serving 10 years. He lived another 21 years before dying in Pittsburgh. His son, George Shiras III, was born in Allegheny and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
First Published: July 10, 2018, 6:52 p.m.
