Shiras, George, Jr.

Shiras, George, Jr. (b. Pittsburgh, Pa., 26 January 1832; d. Pittsburgh, Pa., 2 August 1924; interred Allegheny Cemetery, Pittsburgh), associate justice, 1892–1903. George Shiras, Jr., was an obscure but nonetheless important justice in determining winning blocs on the Court and designating accepted constitutional interpretations. His career demonstrated the impact that background variables of family position, educational experience, and pre‐Court career can have on judicial attitudes.

The son of a wealthy, retired brewery merchant turned gentleman farmer, Shiras was raised to respect property and business entrepreneurship. Educated at Yale College, Shiras also spent a short time at the law school there. Throughout the Civil War he left military service to his brothers, concentrating instead on his expanding, lucrative corporate law practice. He refused positions in public service, rejecting a senatorial nomination in 1881 on the grounds that it would make him a pawn of Pennsylvania's Republican party machine.

Although Shiras lacked both judicial and public service experience, he was nevertheless nominated to the bench of the United States Supreme Court in July 1892 by President Benjamin Harrison. Two factors were critical in his selection: first, he was from the same geographic section as his predecessor on the Court; and second, he had demonstrated independence of the anti‐Harrison faction of the Pennsylvania Republican party.

Shiras brought to the Court a professional style and a social and economic ideology that shaped his and the Court's constitutional positions from 1892 to 1903. During this time the Court expanded judicial review of socioeconomic legislation through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Shiras's lawyerly approach to case facts and precedent meant that he did not always agree with the bloc of ultraconservative justices dedicated to the establishment of laissez‐faire economics through strict judicial review of state and national progressive reform laws (see Laissez‐Faire Constitutionalism). Thus in Brass v. North Dakota (1894) Shiras produced a liberal opinion upholding state police power to regulate business. Shiras's social and economic background, however, appeared directly in a long line of conservative decisions from United States v. E. C. Knight (1895) to Allgeyer v. Louisiana (1897) that struck down national and state regulatory laws. In these cases Shiras voted to restrict the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and to use the freedom of contract doctrine to annul labor and other social legislation.

Identified by history as the justice who made the Sixteenth Amendment necessary, Shiras's legal reputation has suffered undeservedly. He was accused of having “Shirased,” that is, torpedoed, the most promising reform measure of the 1890s, the income tax. While it was true that he was one of the five justices voting to strike down the income tax in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. (1895), Shiras himself was not apparently the pivotal vote. And this focus has obscured Shiras's liberal civil liberties decisions where he adopted a consistent due process approach and, as in Wong Wing v. United States (1896), protested denial of basic rights to individuals.

Alice Fleetwood Bartee