The Fuller Court

When Morrison Waite died in 1888, President Grover Cleveland nominated Melville Fuller to occupy the Chief Justice's seat on the Supreme Court. Fuller was a corporate lawyer who had also been active in the Illinois Democratic Party, but he was not well known in national political or legal circles.

As Chief Justice, Fuller established a reputation for being an efficient administrator and consensus builder, not an easy task given the fact that 19 different justices served on the Court during Fuller's tenure. However, he wrote few major opinions, evidently preferring to let the other justices set the ideological tone for the Court.

As many scholars of the Supreme Court have noted, the dominant ideology of the Fuller Era was one that embraced economic liberty and laissez-faire capitalism. In an 1897 decision, Justice Peckham, building on the ideas first articulated 24 years earlier in Bradley's Slaughterhouse dissent, declared that the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause guaranteed individuals a "liberty of contract" in pursuit of lawful employment. In 1905, Peckham reiterated this doctrine while striking down a New York law setting a maximum number of hours that bakers could work each week; the landmark Lochner v. New York decision is discussed in the Federalism Timeline.

Dissenting in Lochner, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes forcefully declared that "the Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory," and accused the majority of usurping the power of legislatures to regulate the economy in the public interest. Despite Holmes' opposition, dozens of state and federal economic regulations were struck down during the Fuller years on the grounds that they interfered with the rights of both capitalists and workers. In a well-known case from 1895, United States v. E.C. Knight Company, the Fuller Court refused to apply the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to break up a huge sugar monopoly on the grounds that sugar production was a local activity not subject to the interstate commerce power of Congress. This narrow reading of the Commerce Clause would go on to play a significant role in the coming decades of the Supreme Court.