Joseph Story: “Privileges of Citizens—Fugitives—Slaves”

About the Author

Joseph Story dominated the development of American law in the early-nineteenth-century United States. Appointed at age thirty-two, Story spent the rest of his lifetime on the Supreme Court, where he served over twenty years alongside Chief Justice John Marshall and nearly a decade alongside Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. From his position on the bench, Story participated in numerous decisions that established the broad outlines of constitutional jurisprudence, ranging from cases asserting the federal government's supremacy, as in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), to ones defining the meaning of specific provisions such as the commerce clause, as in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), and the fugitive slave clause, as in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). In these deliberations, Story advocated nationalist constitutional positions demanding that the states operate under a relative degree of federal restraint.

Story worked diligently to defend and popularize the common law, an unwritten legal code inherited from England that the legal community accessed through the study of imported books and largely unreported court decisions. In the early nineteenth century numerous commentators questioned whether such a legal code was proper for a republic. Story answered with an emphatic yes and even tried, though with limited success, to convince his colleagues that the federal courts possessed an inherent common law authority; he wrote numerous opinions explaining the intricacies of various doctrines. Meanwhile, from his position as Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University, Story worked to educate aspiring lawyers to a proper understanding of legal doctrine. The scholarly Story produced a flood of legal treatises on all manner of legal subjects, which contributed to the growing accessibility of the common law to practicing lawyers. He helped establish the common law as the foundation of American jurisprudence. Story died on September 10, 1845, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.