Cummings v. Missouri

Stephen J. Field joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 1863, when American society was experiencing sweeping changes. Early in his tenure, issues arising from the Civil War and Reconstruction dominated the Court’s docket. Field was a champion of individual liberty, which in his mind included entrepreneurial freedom. Anxious to safeguard liberty by confining the reach of government, he insisted that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protected substantive rights. Substantive due process meant that there were certain individual rights, such as the right to acquire property or enter contracts, which government could not arbitrarily abridge. Thus, the due process norm limited legislative power. The due process clause provides both procedural and substantive protection of individual rights. The procedural component of due process requires fair procedures before an individual can be deprived of life, liberty, or property. The substantive component imposes an absolute limit on governmental action regardless of the procedure followed. Field envisioned an active role for the federal judiciary in upholding rights from state abridgement. Although his ideas were often advanced in dissenting opinions, his thinking came to dominate the Court in the late nineteenth century. Writing for the majority in his opinion for the Court in Cummings v. Missouri, Field ruled that state laws requiring people serving in public office to take an oath of loyalty to the Union were ex post facto laws that punish a person for acts that had not been criminal at the time they were committed and thus constituted legislation that inflicts punishment on a person without a judicial trial.