Justice Gabriel Duvall
Today’s Justice of the Day is: GABRIEL DUVALL. Justice Duvall was born on this day, December 6, in 1752.
Justice Duvall was born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the state where he was raised, spent virtually his entire professional life and from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He did not receive any formal university education, which was not uncommon for his era.
Justice Duvall became a clerk of the Maryland Council of Safety in 1775, serving until 1777, when he became a clerk of the Maryland House of Delegates. He left the House of Delegates in 1781 to serve for one year as Commissioner to Preserve Confiscated British Property, and afterwards became a member of the Maryland Governor’s Council, where he remained from 1782 to 1785. Justice Duvall then returned to the House of Delegates, this time as a State Delegate himself, serving there until 1794, when he took office as a member of the United States House of Representatives from his home state. Two year later, he left that position to serve as Chief Justice of the Maryland General Court from 1796 to 1802, and subsequently became Comptroller of the United States Department of Treasury, where he would remain until his appointment to the SCUS.
Justice Duvall was nominated by President James Madison on November 15, 1811, to a seat vacated by Justice Samuel Chase. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on November 18, and received his commission that day. Justice Duvall took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on or around November 23, and served his entire tenure on the Marshall Court. His service was terminated on January 12, 1835, due to his resignation.
Despite his fairly lengthy term of service, Justice Duvall is not especially well remembered today. This may be a function of the relatively muted style he displayed while on the SCUS, as demonstrated by the fact that he only wrote seventeen opinions for the Court and just two dissents from the views expressed by Chief Justice John Marshall. He displayed noticeable loyalty to Chief Justice Marshall throughout his SCUS career, and joined unanimous opinions that articulated Chief Justice Marshall’s pro-federal power doctrine in some of the most important cases of that era, like McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824).