Bradley, Joseph P (b. Albany County, N.Y., 14 Mar. 1813; d. Washington, D.C., 22 Jan. 1892; interred North Reformed Church Cemetery, Newark, N.J.), associate justice, 1870–1892. Oldest of eleven children born to a subsistence farmer, Bradley was a self‐made man, achieving success in professional life through hard work and native ability. Largely self‐taught before he entered Rutgers College at age twenty, Bradley read law after graduation and was admitted to the New Jersey bar in 1839 at the relatively advanced age of twenty‐six. Quickly accepted in legal circles, he married Mary Hornblower, daughter of William
Hornblower, the chief justice of New Jersey. Bradley specialized in providing legal services for railroads, eventually becoming general counsel for the corruption‐ridden Camden and Amboy Line, in which post he seemed to keep his own hands clean. Originally a Whig, Bradley became an early and enthusiastic Republican. When in January 1870 President Ulysses S. Grant received advance intelligence of the Supreme Court's impending invalidation of the Legal Tender Act, he moved swiftly to fill two vacancies with appointees who could be counted on to convert the minority in support of the act into a majority. The pragmatic Bradley was an obvious choice for one seat; the other went to William
Strong. Once on the Court, the two dutifully voted to overturn the year‐old precedent and uphold the Legal Tender Act. (See
Legal Tender Cases.)
In 1877 Bradley accepted the thankless task of serving on the electoral commission created to determine the winner of the disputed presidential election of 1876. On a commission equally balanced between Democrats and Republicans, Bradley was assigned the role of swing man. Although apparently pulled in both directions, he closed ranks with his fellow Republicans and declared Rutherford B. Hayes president‐elect. As if in support of Hayes's conciliatory policy toward the South, Bradley later authored the opinion of the Court in the notorious
Civil Rights Cases (1883), invalidating key provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Opposed, as he put it, to “running the
slavery argument into the ground,” Bradley declared the newly freed blacks to be no longer “the special favorite of the laws.” (pp. 24–25). In the troublesome cases concerning southern state indebtedness that plagued the Court from 1883 to 1890, Bradley again displayed his powerful grip on political realities and his penchant for blunt language and unsubtle legal reasoning. While leading the Court, in
McGahey v. Virginia (1890), to hold Virginia to the obligation of its contracts with bondholders on the basis of a provision making interest on the bonds an offset to state taxes, he simultaneously led it, in
Hans v. Louisiana (1890), to a fateful expansion of a state's immunity from suit in federal court, thereby freeing most other southern states from legal accountability. Hans, still a landmark in federal jurisdiction, holds that states may not be sued in federal court by their own citizens, a result seemingly based on a reading of the constitutional grant of power in
Article III, as explained by the history of the
Eleventh Amendment. In Bradley's view the 1793 decision in
Chisholm v. Georgia created such a “shock of surprise” that the Constitution had been immediately amended to restore in part the original understanding (p. 11). In Hans the Court completed the process.
Joining the Court soon after the ratification of the
Fourteenth Amendment, Bradley participated in many early cases concerning its meaning. Dissenting in the
Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), he argued that the
Privileges and Immunities Clause protects economic enterprise from unreasonable state interference, but during the same term he turned a deaf ear to a feminist plea for protection. When Myra Bradwell challenged her exclusion from the practice of law in Illinois, Bradley filed a separate concurring opinion rejecting her claim (see
Bradwell v. Illinois, 1873). Proposing to write Victorian mores into the Constitution, he declared it “the law of the Creator” that woman's destiny is limited to “the noble and benign offices of wife and mother” (p. 141). (See also
Gender.) Returning to the economic issue, Bradley contributed largely to Chief Justice Morrison
Waite's opinion of the Court in the
Granger Cases (1877), apparently supplying the key concept of property “affected with a public interest” (see
Munn v. Illinois, 1877).
Described in old age by a colleague as full of “vinegar,” Bradley was distinguished by a seasoned willingness to face facts and make hard, and hardheaded, decisions.
Bibliography
Charles Fairman , Mr. Justice Bradley, in Mr. Justice, edited by Allison Dunham and Philip B. Kurland (1956).
John V. Orth
