Justice Samuel Blatchford
Today’s Justice of the Day is: SAMUEL BLATCHFORD. Justice Blatchford took the Judicial Oath to officially join the Supreme Court of the United States on this day, April 3, in 1882.
Justice Blatchford was born on March 9, 1820 in New York City, New York, the state from which he would be appointed to the SCUS. He graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in 1837.
Two years after graduating from college, Justice Blatchford began a three year-long stint as a private secretary to New York Governor William Seward, after which he served as his military secretary (from 1842 to 1845); during that time he also entered private practice in his home town of New York City, where he would work as a private attorney from 1843 to 1845 and then from 1854 to 1862 (he would continue his legal work in Auburn, New York during the nine year-long break in his career starting in 1845). In 1852, he became Court Reporter for the United States Circuit Courts for the Second Circuit (one of the forerunners to today’s United States Courts of Appeals), while he simultaneously started out as publisher of Blatchford’s Circuit Court Reports (a position he would hold until 1888). Justice Blatchford was a Trustee of his alma mater, Columbia College, in 1867, the year he received a recess appointment from President Andrew Johnson to be a Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (the United States Senate would later confirm his appointment to a regular judgeship). He stayed on that court until 1878, when President Rutherford B. Hayes nominated him to be a Judge of the U.S. Circuit Courts for the Second Circuit, where he would ultimately remain (after again successfully receiving confirmation from the U.S. Senate) until his elevation to the SCUS.
Justice Blatchford was nominated by President Chester A. Arthur on March 13, 1882, to a seat vacated by Justice Ward Hunt. He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 22, and received commission that day. Justice Blatchford served on the Waite and Fuller Courts, and his service was terminated on July 7, 1893, due to his death.
Justice Blatchford is not especially well-remembered today, though he was known for being quite the workhorse while at the SCUS. He was an expert on admiralty and patent law, and is said to have been one of the most well-versed legal scholars of the nation’s banking regulations. Justice Blatchford did not have an especially significant impact on the direction of the SCUS or its jurisprudence, and he supposedly holds the record for writing and joining the fewest dissenting opinions of any Member of the SCUS since the Marshall Court.