Matthews, Thomas Stanley

Matthews, Thomas Stanley (b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 21 July 1824; d. Washington, D.C., 22 Mar. 1889; interred Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati), associate justice, 1881–1889. Thomas Stanley Matthews was the first child of Thomas Johnson Matthews, a professor of mathematics and natural history at Sylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and Isabella Brown. He preferred to be called Stanley and dropped his first name as an adult. Matthews entered Kenyon College as a junior and graduated in 1840. He read law for two years and then moved to Maury County, Tennessee, where he began a law practice and edited a newspaper. In 1844 he married Mary Ann black and after her death in 1885 he wed Mary Theaker of Washington, D.C.

Matthews was originally nominated to the Supreme Court on 26 January 1881 by President Rutherford B. Hayes to replace retiring Justice Noah H. Swayne. President Hayes, a fellow Ohioan, lifelong friend, and political colleague of his nominee, met Matthews when the two men were undergraduates at Kenyon College. Matthews served under Hayes in the Twenty‐third Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War, and in the disputed presidential election of 1876, Matthews argued the case for the Hayes‐Republican electors against the Tilden‐Democrats in the electoral commission inquiry in Louisiana.

Matthews met bitter opposition and the Senate took no action on the nomination. It was only after Hayes's successor, President James A. Garfield (also from Ohio), renominated him on 14 March 1881 that Matthews was confirmed on 12 May 1881 by a vote of 24 to 23. Opposition to Matthews's nomination was rooted in his work as legal counsel to railroad and corporate interests and several political controversies in which he reluctantly had taken part. One of these, apparently distorted by opponents at his confirmation, was his prosecution as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio (1858–1861) in 1859 of a newspaper reporter for aiding in the escape of two fugitive slaves. Some critics suggested that Matthews, who had embraced abolitionism, had sold his conscience for political favor. The specter of this case had been revived earlier to help defeat Matthews in his bid for a congressional seat in 1876, though he won a Senate seat the following year (1877–1879).

Justice Matthews served only seven years and ten months, yet in that short period he authored an impressive 232 opinions and five dissents. Matthews was a craftsman and realist rather than an ideologue. His two most famous opinions, undisturbed as precedent after more than a century, are Hurtado v. California (1884) and Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886). Both illustrate Matthews's progressive and pragmatic approach to constitutional law.

In Hurtado, Matthews rejected the argument that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments' “due process of law” provision required states to seek grand jury indictments or presentments in prosecuting felonies. Against the argument promoted by Hurtado's counsel that grand jury indictments were an ancient requirement of English common law, Matthews argued that this “would be to deny every quality of the law but its age, and to render it incapable of progress or improvement” (p. 529). Instead of looking at the form of the requirement of due process, Matthews concluded that if the defendant was given fair notice of the charge and sufficient time to prepare a defense, then the purposes of due process protection was satisfied.

Matthews's Yick Wo opinion stands as one of the few minority rights opinions in the post‐Reconstruction era and is a marvel of realistic jurisprudence. He looked beyond the neutral language of San Francisco's ordinance regulating the operation of public laundries to the statistically disparate application of the ordinance against Chinese laundry proprietors to find a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. His classic statement stands as the basis of all twentieth‐century public civil rights disparate impact cases: “Though the law itself be fair on its face and impartial in appearance, yet, if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discrimination between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, and denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution” (pp. 373–374).

Bibliography

Charles T. Greve , Stanley Matthews, in Great American Lawyers: A History of the Legal Profession in America, edited by William Draper Lewis, vol. 7 (1909), pp. 393–427.

N.E.H. Hull