Fuller, Melville Weston

Fuller, Melville Weston (b. Augusta, Maine, 11 Feb. 1833; d. Sorrento, Maine, 4 Jul. 1910; interred Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Ill.), chief justice, 1888–1910. Of an old New England family, Fuller grew up surrounded by lawyers. Because of his parents' divorce, he was raised in the household of his maternal grandfather, the chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1853, Fuller read law in his uncles' law offices and briefly attended the Harvard Law School, an experience that later earned him the distinction of being the first chief justice with significant academic legal training. In 1855 he was admitted to the bar in Maine but soon left the state, apparently because of a disappointment in romance. Settling in Chicago, Fuller engaged in a moderately successful law practice. He married in 1858, but his wife died six years later. An active Democrat, he enthusiastically supported Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln. Fuller served in the Illinois constitutional convention in 1861 and for one term (1863–1864) in the state house of representatives. Although close to Copperhead circles during the Civil War, Fuller was never actively disloyal. In 1866 he married Mary Ellen Coolbaugh, securing a boost to business, since his new father‐in‐law headed the largest bank in Chicago. Thereafter Fuller withdrew from politics and devoted himself to making money from his burgeoning law practice and real estate investments.

Increasingly known as a lawyer's lawyer, he specialized in appellate work, particularly in commercial cases, appearing regularly before the United States Supreme Court. On the death of Chief Justice Morrison Waite in March 1888, President Grover Cleveland decided to appoint an Illinoisan in hopes of bettering the Democrats' chances in the November election. When the president's first choice declined the post, Cleveland quickly turned to Fuller, who shared his views in favor of sound money and against protective tariffs.

On the Court, Fuller showed himself a convivial colleague and competent administrator rather than a judicial leader, his slender stock of jurisprudential ideas suiting him for little else (See Chief Justice, Office of the). Himself a man of property, Fuller often appeared to the common man as the defender of wealth, most notably in his opinions for the Court in both rounds of Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895), invalidating the federal income tax on the questionable ground of the prohibition against direct taxes unless proportioned to state population (See Property Rights). The result was eventually overturned by the Sixteenth Amendment. In the same term as the income tax case, Fuller also penned the majority opinion in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895), the prosecution of the Sugar Trust under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Finding in favor of the trust, Fuller held that manufacture for sale is not commerce, a dubious interpretation that was to be steadily eroded by later decisions. In commercial law, Fuller's specialty, he led the Court in Leisy v. Hardin (1890) to adopt his version of the “original package” doctrine, holding that imported goods still in the original package were not subject to state regulation. As applied in Leisy, this invalidated a key part of the Iowa prohibition law. The doctrine survived, but its specific application was promptly eliminated by legislation ending federal protection of interstate traffic in liquor. In In re Rahrer (1891), Fuller wrote the opinion upholding the constitutionality of that statute.

Fuller believed that the Fourteenth Amendment worked “no revolutionary change”; in consequence he could preside comfortably over a Court that turned a blind eye to racial injustice. On other civil rights issues he was unpredictable, dissenting in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that the children of Chinese immigrants born in this country were American citizens, and again in Downes v. Bidwell (1901), one of the Insular Cases, which held that the newly acquired island territories were not covered by the Constitution. Concerning the rights of labor, Fuller was also unpredictable, writing the opinion of the Court in the Danbury hatters' case, Loewe v. Lawlor (1908), which held the Sherman Antitrust Act applicable to labor unions, while consistently limiting the fellow‐servant rule, which insulated employers from liability for many injuries to employees (See Labor).

Enjoying the limelight and the break from judicial routine, Fuller accepted appointment to the Venezuelan Boundary Commission in 1897 and served on the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague from 1900 (See Extrajudicial Activities).

Bibliography

Willard L. King , Melville Weston Fuller (1950).
James W. Ely, Jr. , The Chief Justiceship of Melville W. Fuller, 1888–1910 (1995).

John V. Orth