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Abstract
David Brewer is hardly a household name in the contemporary legal academy. Most American professors of constitutional law would have a hard time placing his nearly twenty-one years of service on the U.S. Supreme Court, though most would be savvy enough to guess "Lochner era." He is probably the least well-known of all the Justices whose careers are examined in this Symposium. (Brewer's longtime colleague Rufus Peckham is probably his chief contender for this title.) For the record, Brewer sat on the Supreme Court from January of 1890 until his death in March of 1910.
In his own era, Brewer was anything but obscure. He played an important, and sometimes pivotal, role on the nation's highest court in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. During his Professor of Law, Marquette University. Visiting Professor of Law, University of Virginia. The author wishes to express his special thanks to Jim Ely, Linda Przybyszewski, and Sandy Olken for their comments on an earlier version of this Essay.
Recommended Citation
J. Gordon Hylton,
The Perils of Popularity: David Josiah Brewer and the Politics of Judicial Reputation,
62 Vanderbilt Law Review
567
(2009)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol62/iss2/8