Rufus Wheeler Peckham

Rufus Wheeler Peckham (November 8, 1838 – October 24, 1909) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1896 to 1909, and is the most recent Democratic nominee approved by a Republican-majority Senate. A prominent figure in the era often described as the height of laissez-faire constitutionalism, he was known for his strong use of substantive due process to invalidate regulations of business and property. Peckham’s namesake father, Rufus Wheeler Peckham, was also a lawyer and judge, and a U.S. Representative from New York, while his older brother, Wheeler Hazard Peckham (1833–1905), was one of the lawyers who prosecuted William M. Tweed and a failed nominee to the Supreme Court.

Peckham was born in Albany, New York, to Rufus Wheeler Peckham and Isabella Adeline Lacey. His mother died when he was nine years old. He attended The Albany Academy and, following his father’s example, read law in his father’s office rather than attending a formal law school. He was admitted to the bar in Albany in 1859. Peckham began his legal career in private practice in Albany, where he quickly established himself in the city’s legal and political circles. His early professional development was shaped by close observation of his father’s career, which included service as Albany district attorney, justice of the New York Supreme Court, and judge of the New York Court of Appeals until the elder Peckham’s death in the 1873 sinking of the Ville du Havre.

After roughly a decade in private practice, Peckham entered public service as Albany district attorney, serving from 1869 to 1872 in the same office his father had once held. He then returned to private practice and served as counsel to the City of Albany, further solidifying his reputation as a skilled advocate and adviser. Active in local Democratic politics, Peckham served as a New York delegate to the 1876 Democratic National Convention. During these years he also became a confidant of leading industrial and financial magnates, including J. Pierpont Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, relationships that later led many observers to believe he was predisposed to favor business interests when he sat on the Supreme Court.

Peckham’s judicial career began in earnest when he was elected as a trial judge of the New York Supreme Court in 1883. In 1886 he was elected to the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, again following a path previously taken by his father. While serving as an associate judge on the Court of Appeals, he was also a member of the Albany Law School Board of Trustees, contributing to legal education in the state. His appointment to the New York Court of Appeals marked the third major public position in which he succeeded his father—after the Albany district attorneyship and service on the New York Supreme Court—underscoring the family’s multigenerational influence on New York’s legal institutions.

As a member of the Democratic Party representing New York, Rufus Wheeler Peckham contributed to the legislative process during one term in office. His service in Congress occurred during a significant period in American history, during which he participated in the democratic process and represented the interests of his constituents. Although his later fame would rest on his judicial work, this period of congressional service formed part of his broader engagement with public affairs and the governance of both his state and the nation.

The path of the Peckham family to the nation’s highest court was marked by political struggle. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland nominated Rufus Peckham’s brother, Wheeler Hazard Peckham, to the Supreme Court. The nomination became entangled in a political conflict between Cleveland and New York Senator David B. Hill, and Wheeler’s nomination was ultimately blocked, the second Cleveland nominee Hill managed to defeat; Senator Edward Douglass White was confirmed instead. When Justice Howell Edmunds Jackson died in 1895, creating another vacancy, Hill’s political influence had waned. Cleveland then turned to Rufus Peckham as his nominee. The Senate, controlled by Republicans, confirmed Peckham within six days in December 1895, and he was sworn in as an Associate Justice on January 6, 1896. Peckham remains the last Supreme Court Justice seated by a Democratic president when the Senate had a Republican majority, and the most recent Democratic nominee approved under those circumstances.

On the Supreme Court, Peckham became one of the leading exponents of substantive due process and economic liberty. His tenure has been described by scholars as emblematic of laissez-faire constitutionalism, during which the Court frequently struck down state and federal efforts to regulate labor standards and economic relations. His most famous opinion was the majority opinion in Lochner v. New York (1905), in which the Court invalidated a New York law limiting bakers’ working hours to sixty per week as an unconstitutional interference with the individual right to freedom of contract and as unnecessary for the protection of health or safety. In the same decision, however, Peckham upheld other workplace regulations governing bakers’ facilities that he regarded as legitimate health and safety measures, illustrating his view that not all regulation was incompatible with constitutional liberty of contract.

Beyond Lochner, Peckham was noted for his expansive interpretation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, reading it to prohibit all restraints of trade rather than only those already condemned under existing common law. His record on civil rights for African Americans is notable for his departure from his usual skepticism of state power; he joined the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), voting to uphold state-imposed racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine, though he did so without a written opinion. At the same time, Peckham and Justice David Josiah Brewer were more likely than any of their colleagues to vote in favor of Chinese litigants in the numerous immigration cases that came before the Court, reflecting a more protective stance toward certain minority rights in the context of federal immigration and exclusion laws. Among his most significant later opinions was Ex parte Young (1908), in which he authored the landmark decision holding that a federal court may issue an injunction against a state officer to prevent enforcement of an unconstitutional state law, a doctrine that became central to federal judicial review of state action.

Peckham served on the Supreme Court until his death from cardiovascular disease on October 24, 1909, at the age of 70. During his thirteen years on the Court, he wrote 303 opinions and dissented only nine times, a record that underscored both his productivity and his general alignment with the Court’s majority during that era. His death occurred during what biographer Willard King has called “perhaps the worst year in the history of the Court”—the term from October 1909 to May 1910—when two justices, Peckham and David J. Brewer, died, another justice, William Henry Moody, became fully incapacitated, and Chief Justice Melville Fuller’s health was in serious decline.

Rufus W. Peckham was buried in Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York. He was married to Harriette Maria Arnold (December 13, 1839 – July 25, 1917), who was later interred beside him. They had two sons, Henry Arnold Peckham (August 6, 1868 – February 16, 1907) and Rufus W. Peckham Jr. (January 28, 1870 – September 16, 1899), both of whom predeceased their parents. Harriette Arnold Peckham was also the paternal aunt of heiress Dorothy Arnold, whose unexplained disappearance on December 12, 1910 attracted intense public attention and was described in 1928 by United Press Associations (now United Press International) as “the great search of the age.”