Lamar, Joseph Rucker (b. Ruckersville, Ga., 14 Oct. 1857; d. Washington, D.C., 2 Jan. 1916; interred Sand Hills Cemetery, Augusta, Ga.), associate justice, 1911–1916. Joseph Rucker Lamar followed a family legacy of involvement in civic affairs. The Lamars and Ruckers, among the social elite of their respective communities, had fashioned a reputation for public leadership. Two relatives on the paternal side, in fact, had achieved national prominence during the nineteenth century. Mirabeau Lamar served as president of the fledgling Republic of Texas (1838–1841) and L. Q. C.
Lamar enjoyed a distinguished career as a member of Congress, secretary of the interior, and associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1888–1893). As a respected attorney and able jurist on the supreme courts of state and nation, Joseph R. Lamar kept alive that ancestral heritage.
As a youth Lamar received the cultural and educational advantages derived from social affluence. Reared in the traditional graces of southern gentility, Lamar developed patrician values that continued to influence personal and professional actions throughout his life. He attended the University of Georgia and graduated in 1877 from Bethany College in West Virginia.
While Lamar served briefly in the Georgia legislature, his enduring public contributions as well as personal pleasure came in the realm of law, not politics. He studied law for one term at Washington and Lee University, then served as an apprentice before admission to the Georgia bar in 1878. Widespread recognition of his legal skills led to his appointment as one of three commissioners charged with the revision of the Georgia code. Lamar alone prepared the volume on civil law that the state legislature approved in 1895. A student of legal history, he also wrote several celebrated monographs on the evolution of law in Georgia. Appointed to the state supreme court in 1903, Lamar served two years before returning to private practice. He often represented corporations, mainly railroads, and on occasion argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nomination to the Supreme Court in 1910 surprised the Georgia lawyer who had only the year earlier met President William Howard
Taft while the latter vacationed in Augusta. The Senate quickly and unanimously confirmed the appointment, and Lamar joined a Court confronted with issues, among others, of interstate commerce, state and national police power, and administrative discretion.
The tenure of Lamar was by and large unremarkable. On a highly consensual Court, he almost always voted with the majority. His noteworthy opinions were those that expanded administrative discretion for executive officials. In
United States v. Grimaud (1911), for example, Lamar upheld the constitutionality of the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 against charges that it unlawfully delegated legislative power to the secretary of agriculture. This landmark decision allowed administrators the discretion to “fill in the details” when implementing laws. Similarly, in United States v.
Midwest Oil Company (1915), Lamar expanded presidential power to withdraw land from public use without congressional authorization.
Lamar served in one noteworthy extrajudicial capacity. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson, his childhood friend, dispatched Lamar to participate in sensitive diplomatic negotiations regarding Mexico at the Argentina, Brazil, Chile (ABC.) Conference. Lamar discharged that duty with the usual temperance that so characterized his public life.
Bibliography
Clarinda Pendleton Lamar , The Life of Joseph Rucker Lamar (1926).
John W. Winkle III
