David Josiah Brewer

David Josiah Brewer was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1890 to 1910. He was born in Smyrna (modern-day İzmir, Turkey) to Congregationalist missionaries, and grew up in Connecticut. He attended Wesleyan University, Yale University, and Albany Law School. He moved to Kansas, where he practiced law and held various judicial positions. He was elected to the Kansas Supreme Court in 1870, and served for fourteen years. He was appointed as a federal circuit judge by President Chester A. Arthur in 1884. He was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Benjamin Harrison in 1889, and confirmed by the Senate in 1890. He took the oath of office on January 6, 1890. He was a conservative jurist who supported states' rights, opposed broad interpretations of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, and voted to strike down economic regulations that he felt infringed on the freedom of contract. He joined the majority in decisions such as Lochner v. New York (1905), in which the Court invoked the doctrine of substantive due process to strike down a New York labor law. He also wrote opinions on issues such as immigration, civil rights, taxation, and the separation of church and state. He was an advocate for the rights of women and minorities, and a supporter of the Americanization of the Philippines. He was the author of several books, including The World's Best Orations (1899) and The United States a Christian Nation (1905). He died of pneumonia in Washington, D.C. on March 28, 1910, and was buried in Mount Muncie Cemetery in Lansing, Kansas. He was the uncle of Justice Stephen J. Field, and the brother-in-law of Justice Henry Billings Brown.