Joseph Story

Joseph Story (September 18, 1779 – September 10, 1845) was an American lawyer, jurist, legal scholar, and politician who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1812 to 1845. He is most remembered for his opinions in Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee and United States v. The Amistad, and especially for his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, first published in 1833. Dominating the field in the 19th century, this work is a cornerstone of early American jurisprudence. It is the second comprehensive treatise on the provisions of the U.S. Constitution and remains a critical source of historical information about the forming of the American republic and the early struggles to define its law. Historians generally agree that Story reshaped American law—as much or more than Chief Justice John Marshall or anyone else—in a conservative direction that protected property rights, and he is widely regarded as one of the most significant figures in early American constitutional history.

Story was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, the first child of Dr. Elisha Story and his second wife, Mehitable (Pedrick) Story. His father, a physician, was a member of the Sons of Liberty and took part in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, later moving from Boston to Marblehead during the American Revolutionary War. Mehitable Pedrick was the nineteen‑year‑old daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant who lost his fortune during the war. Joseph was the first-born of eleven children of this second marriage; Dr. Story had earlier been married to Ruth (née Ruddock), who died before his marriage to Mehitable, and he had children from that first marriage as well. Joseph grew up in a politically engaged, patriotic household shaped by Revolutionary ideals and New England commercial life.

As a boy, Story attended Marblehead Academy until the fall of 1794, where he studied under schoolmaster William Harris, later president of Columbia University. An incident in which Harris publicly beat him after Story chastised a fellow student led his father to withdraw him from the school. In January 1795, Story was admitted to Harvard University. At Harvard he joined Adelphi, a student‑run literary society, and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. He graduated in 1798, then “read law” in the traditional manner under prominent Massachusetts lawyers Samuel Sewall and Samuel Putnam. After completing his legal training, he was admitted to the bar in July 1801 and established a law practice in Salem, Massachusetts.

Story’s early career combined an active legal practice with rapid entry into politics. A Democratic‑Republican, he served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1805 to 1807, and from 1807 to 1809 he was state attorney for Essex County, Massachusetts. In 1808 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Jacob Crowninshield, serving from May 23, 1808, to March 3, 1809. He did not seek a full term and returned to private practice in Salem. Story reentered the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1811 and was chosen Speaker of the House, demonstrating his growing influence in state politics. During this period he also began to attract attention as a legal thinker and advocate in commercial and maritime cases, laying the groundwork for his later prominence in admiralty and equity jurisprudence.

Story’s personal life was marked by both tragedy and enduring family ties. His first wife, Mary Lynde Fitch Oliver, whom he married early in his career, died in June 1805, shortly after their marriage and only two months after the death of his father. On August 1808 he married Sarah Waldo Wetmore, daughter of Judge William Wetmore of Boston. They had seven children, but only two—Mary and William Wetmore Story—survived to adulthood. William Wetmore Story became a noted poet and sculptor; his bust of his father was installed in the Harvard Law School Library, and he later edited and published The Life and Letters of Joseph Story in two volumes (Boston and London, 1851). William Wetmore Story himself became the subject of a biography, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, by the novelist Henry James. Contemporaries remembered Joseph Story as sociable and warm; longtime Washington journalist Benjamin Perley Poore wrote that, although the Supreme Court of that era was known for its joviality, Story was its leading exemplar of good humor, asserting that every man should laugh at least an hour each day and supplying a “great fund of humorous anecdotes” to that end.

On November 15, 1811, President James Madison nominated Story to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to succeed Justice William Cushing, who had died 14 months earlier. At 32 years and 58 days old at the time of his nomination, Story became—and, as of 2025, remains—the youngest person ever nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Madison had previously nominated John Quincy Adams to the vacancy; although confirmed by the Senate, Adams declined to serve. The Senate confirmed Story on November 18, 1811, and he took the judicial oath on February 3, 1812. In 1810, shortly before his appointment, he had been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1814 he became a member of the American Antiquarian Society, later serving as that society’s vice president from 1831 to 1845. In 1844 he was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society, reflecting his standing in the broader intellectual community.

During more than three decades on the Supreme Court, Story emerged as one of the Court’s most prolific and influential justices; of the members of the Marshall Court, only Chief Justice John Marshall wrote more opinions. In Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816), he articulated a powerful nationalist vision of the Constitution, declaring that it was “ordained and established not by the States in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the Constitution declares, by ‘the people of the United States.’” In that case he argued that the Supreme Court must possess appellate jurisdiction over state courts to prevent discordant and provincial interpretations of federal law, emphasizing his belief in legal “science” and the need for uniformity of law throughout the Union. His opinion in United States v. The Amistad (1841) further enhanced his reputation, as he held that Africans who had seized control of the Spanish schooner Amistad were illegally enslaved and should be freed, a decision celebrated by antislavery advocates. At the same time, Story’s jurisprudence consistently favored a strong national government, economic centralization, and robust judicial review, and he was a leading architect of federal common law in commercial and admiralty matters.

Story’s position on slavery and the Union was complex and has been the subject of extensive historical debate. Personally opposed to slavery, he nonetheless wrote the majority opinion in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), striking down a Pennsylvania “personal liberty” law that placed procedural restrictions on the recapture of fugitive slaves. Relying on Article IV, section 2 of the Constitution, he concluded that the fugitive slave clause, though not using the word “slavery,” was clearly intended to secure runaway slaves to southern slaveholders and that recognition of this “species of property” was indispensable to the constitutional bargain without which the Union could not have been formed. Scholars such as H. Robert Baker have argued that Story’s opinion, while apparently favoring slaveholders, was crafted to uphold the Union and federal supremacy rather than to endorse a natural right of property in human beings. In Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of Warren Bridge (1837), Story’s dissent—summarized in his declaration “I stand upon the old law”—reflected his conservative defense of vested property rights against what he saw as legislative encroachment, even as the Jacksonian majority upheld a more expansive view of state authority to promote economic development.

Story’s nationalism also shaped his approach to federal common law. In Swift v. Tyson (1842), a case involving a fraudulent bill of exchange tied to land in Maine, he used the occasion to narrow the reach of section 34 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which had directed federal courts to apply state statutes as rules of decision in certain cases. Writing for a unanimous Court, he held that the provision was “strictly limited to local statutes and local usages” and did not extend to general commercial law, thereby allowing federal courts to develop a body of federal common law in commercial matters. Although Swift was later overruled by Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938), Story’s opinion marked a high point of antebellum judicial nationalism. Many legal scholars also credit Story with shaping the modern doctrine of remittitur in American law through his 1822 decision in Blunt v. Little, while sitting on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Adapting an English practice, he was the first to permit remittitur at the defendant’s initiative and on the ground of excessive damages, rather than solely to correct a plaintiff’s legal error, a procedural innovation that became widely accepted in federal and state courts.

In addition to his work on the Supreme Court, Story exercised great influence as a circuit judge and as a legal educator. Riding circuit for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, he authored a large body of admiralty and equity decisions that were collected and published by John Gallison (two volumes), William P. Mason (five volumes), Charles Sumner (three volumes), and his son William Wetmore Story (three volumes). These opinions were praised for establishing foundational principles in admiralty and equity jurisprudence. In 1829 he moved from Salem to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to become the first Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University. There he met with remarkable success as a teacher, winning the affection of his students, who benefited from instruction by a sitting Supreme Court justice. His teaching and writing helped transform Harvard Law School into a leading center of legal education and disseminated his vision of a national, scientifically ordered legal system.

Story was also one of the most successful American authors of the first half of the 19th century. By the time he turned 65, on September 18, 1844, he reportedly earned about $10,000 a year from book royalties, more than double his $4,500 salary as an associate justice. His major treatises included Commentaries on the Law of Bailments (1832); Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (3 vols., 1833), accompanied by a one‑volume abridgment the same year; The Constitutional Class Book (1834), later expanded as A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States (1840, with a posthumous 1847 edition); Commentaries on the Conflict of Laws (1834), often regarded as his most significant work and substantially revised in a second edition in 1841; Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence (2 vols., 1835–1836); Equity Pleadings (1838); Law of Agency (1839); Law of Partnership (1841); Law of Bills of Exchange (1843); and Law of Promissory Notes (1845). He also edited several standard legal works, and his Miscellaneous Writings, first published in 1835, appeared in an enlarged edition in 1851. Story contributed numerous articles to The Encyclopedia Americana, including entries on Common Law, Congress of the United States, Contracts, Courts of England and the United States, Criminal Law, Death, Punishment of, Domicil, Equity, Evidence, Jury, Lien, Law, Legislation, and Codes, Natural Law, Law of Nations, Prize, and Usury, sometimes being identified by the editors as an “eminent American jurist.”

Politically and intellectually, Story opposed Jacksonian democracy, which he viewed as an “oppression” of property rights by republican governments when popular majorities in the 1830s began to restrict and erode the property rights of a minority of wealthy men. R. Kent Newmyer has portrayed him as a “Statesman of the Old Republic” who sought to stand above democratic politics and shape the law in accordance with the republicanism of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall and the New England Whigs of the 1820s and 1830s, including Daniel Webster. Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution encapsulated this ideology, stressing the sovereignty of the people rather than the states and attacking doctrines of state sovereignty—especially those advanced by southern theorists—that he believed threatened the stability of the Union. Throughout his service on both the Marshall and Taney Courts, he championed the notion of legal science and the view that the Union could be strengthened through the uniform and centralized application of law, even when that meant, as in Prigg, sacrificing the rights and freedom of Black Americans to preserve what he regarded as the constitutional compact.

Beyond the courtroom and classroom, Story played a notable role in American civic and commemorative culture. In 1831 he delivered the principal oration at the dedication of Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, an address that helped launch the “rural cemetery” movement and linked it to ideals of an orderly, well‑regulated republic governed by law. His speech became a model for subsequent cemetery dedication addresses, culminating in Edward Everett’s oration at the consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863; scholars such as Garry Wills have identified Story’s address as an important precursor to President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Upon his death in Cambridge on September 10, 1845, Story was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where his grave is marked by a piece of sepulchral statuary executed by his son, William Wetmore Story. He left behind a vast body of judicial opinions, treatises, and essays that continued to shape American law and constitutional interpretation long after his death. Story County, Iowa, was later named in his honor, reflecting his enduring reputation in the legal and political history of the United States.