Blair, John, Jr.

Blair, John, Jr. (b. Williamsburg, Va., 1732; d. Williamsburg, 31 Aug. 1800; interred Bruton Parish churchyard, Williamsburg), associate justice, 1789–1795. The son of John and Mary Munro Blair, John Blair studied law at the Middle Temple in London in 1755–1756 after graduating from William and Mary College with honors in 1754. In 1756 he returned to Virginia and commenced a successful law practice before the General Court in Williamsburg. From 1765 to 1770 he served in the House of Burgesses, where he opposed Patrick Henry's Stamp Act resolutions in 1765, but favored economic boycotts of English imports in 1769–1770. Although he served as clerk of the Governor's Council from 1770 to 1775, he supported the revolutionary movement. A joint session of the legislature elected him to the newly constituted state General Court in 1777 and in 1779 he was chosen chief justice of that tribunal. In 1780 the legislature elected him chancellor of the High Court of Chancery. He also served as a member of Virginia's first Court of Appeals, which was organized in May 1779. While on the latter tribunal he and one other judge declared in Commonwealth of Virginia v. Caton et al. (1782) that the court had the power to declare invalid an unconstitutional act of the legislature, one of the first expressions of judicial review.

Perhaps because of Blair's distinguished judicial service and his support, as a delegate to the Philadelphia and ratifying conventions, of the new Constitution, George Washington, on 24 September 1789, nominated him to be one of the original six members of the United States Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed him two days later. Justice Blair's most significant opinion came in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793), delivered seriatim in support of the Court's ruling that Article III, section 2 of the United States Constitution entitled a citizen of one state to sue another state in a federal circuit court. The strongest point in Blair's opinion dealt with the assertion that Article III only contemplated that a state would appear in federal court as a plaintiff. Clearly that argument failed, he wrote, when one understood that Article III also conferred jurisdiction on the federal judiciary in controversies between two states, one of which had to be a defendant. (See Judicial Power and Jurisdiction.) Georgia refused to appear before the Court or to honor its decision. Congress subsequently proposed and the states ratified the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution, which overruled Chisholm v. Georgia.

Blair participated in perhaps his most significant opinion while sitting on the United States Circuit Court (required of Supreme Court justices until after the Civil War). In Hayburn's Case (1792), Blair and his two colleagues (James Wilson and Richard Peters) became the first federal judges to hold an act of Congress unconstitutional when they ruled that a federal statute requiring circuit courts to act as pension commissions violated the separation of powers doctrine and the spirit of judicial independence.

Much of what little other business the Supreme Court transacted during Blair's tenure concerned technical rulings on admiralty and prize law, with which he was in accord. Pleading failing health, he resigned from the Court on 25 October 1795 and retired to his home in Williamsburg. His wife, Jean Balfour, had died four years earlier.

Robert M. Ireland