John Marshall Harlan Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
John Marshall Harlan was born in Kentucky in 1833 into a prominent border-state family rooted in law and politics. He was named for Chief Justice John Marshall, a signal of the legal heritage his father, James Harlan, hoped he would carry forward. The Harlan household reflected the contradictions of its time and place: it was committed to the Union yet tied to a slaveholding society. Harlan received a classical education, studied at a leading Kentucky college, and pursued legal training that prepared him for rapid entry into the bar. As a young lawyer he established himself in practice and in the civic life of Kentucky, building a reputation for energy, eloquence, and a forthright manner that would later be unmistakable on the national stage.

Civil War and Political Transformation
When the Civil War broke out, Harlan cast his lot with the Union. He took up arms in a Kentucky regiment, rising to command and serving as a colonel. He was a Unionist who, like many in Kentucky, initially believed in preserving the Constitution as it had been, and he criticized some policies of the Lincoln administration in the war's early years. The war and its aftermath, however, altered his outlook. He came to accept the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments as fundamental transformations that demanded loyalty in letter and spirit. During Reconstruction he became one of the most visible Republicans in Kentucky, a difficult position in a state drifting toward the Democratic Party. He ran for governor and campaigned notably and tirelessly, even in defeat, for the principles of national Union and citizenship rights.

Path to the Supreme Court
Harlan's political prominence and legal acumen drew the attention of national leaders. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes selected him to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The appointment placed a former border-state Union officer and one-time slaveholder at the heart of the nation's constitutional debates just as Reconstruction was giving way to retrenchment. Harlan joined a Court led first by Chief Justice Morrison Waite and later by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, serving alongside figures such as Stephen J. Field, Joseph P. Bradley, and, in the next generation, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He remained on the bench until his death in 1911, a tenure spanning more than three decades.

On the Supreme Court: Race and the Constitution
Harlan became best known for his lonely and prophetic opinions on civil rights. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, when the Court struck down federal protections against racial discrimination by private businesses, he stood alone in dissent. He argued that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments authorized Congress to enact robust measures to dismantle the badges and incidents of slavery. He insisted that the nation had a constitutional duty to secure equal access to public accommodations and to protect Black citizens against private as well as state-imposed discrimination.

His most famous dissent came in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), where the Court, in an opinion by Justice Henry Billings Brown, upheld state-imposed racial segregation in railway cars. Harlan declared that the Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. He warned that enforced separation would become a pernicious caste system, fundamentally at odds with the promise of equal citizenship. Time proved him right; generations later, Plessy's rationale collapsed under the weight of the civil rights movement and subsequent jurisprudence, while Harlan's words became a touchstone for equality.

Harlan also protested efforts to curtail Black political power. In Giles v. Harris (1903), when the Court declined to remedy disenfranchisement schemes that effectively nullified the Fifteenth Amendment, he dissented, arguing that the federal courts could not turn a blind eye to systematic exclusion from the franchise. He later dissented when the Court allowed Kentucky to outlaw racially integrated education at Berea College in 1908, pressing again that the state could not erect barriers denying citizens the equal right to learn together.

Economic Power, Federal Authority, and Liberty
Harlan was no simple partisan of any single constitutional ideology. He respected state police powers but believed the national government could act decisively to curb corporate concentrations that threatened competition. He wrote the opinion that broke up the Northern Securities Company in 1904, reading the Sherman Antitrust Act as a real restraint on vast industrial combinations. He was skeptical of efforts to strike down progressive economic regulation merely because it interfered with contract. In Lochner v. New York (1905), he dissented from the decision invalidating a maximum-hours law for bakers, arguing the state could regulate to protect health and safety. At the same time, he recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment had substantive content: in Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad v. Chicago (1897), he authored the opinion holding that the Due Process Clause required states to provide just compensation when they took private property for public use. That ruling became a foundational step in the doctrine that key guarantees in the Bill of Rights apply to the states.

Harlan was equally vigorous in tax and commerce cases. When the Court in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co. struck down a federal income tax in 1895, he dissented, arguing that national fiscal power had to be construed in a manner consistent with the needs of a modern nation. Across these domains he sought a balance: union and liberty reinforced each other when law took seriously both the dignity of the individual and the authority of the people, acting through Congress and the states, to solve pressing social problems.

Territory, Citizenship, and the Nation
At the turn of the century, the nation acquired overseas territories, and the Court confronted whether the Constitution fully applied there. In the Insular Cases, Harlan dissented, warning against a regime in which residents of American territories could be governed without the full protections of the Constitution. To him, the national charter was not a mere ornament of statehood but a safeguard of liberty wherever the United States exercised sovereignty.

Personal Life and Character
Harlan's public commitments grew out of personal experiences that were never far from the surface. His father, James Harlan, was a major influence, modeling both ambition and public service. Harlan married Malvina Shanklin Harlan, whose later reminiscences described the strains and satisfactions of life in Washington and offered intimate insights into the Justice's moral seriousness and daily habits. He maintained a respectful bond with Robert Harlan, a successful businessman and political figure widely understood to be his half-brother, and that relationship shaped his moral imagination in an era riven by race. On the Court he was collegial but unafraid to stand alone; he worked with Chief Justices Waite and Fuller, and in his last year served under Chief Justice Edward Douglass White. He valued the craft of judging, read widely in history, and wrote in a direct, vigorous style that made his dissents memorable.

Legacy
By the time of his death in Washington in 1911, Harlan's votes had not remade the law of his day, but his voice had altered the country's constitutional conversation. Later generations of lawyers, judges, and citizens came to view his civil rights dissents as maps to a more inclusive order. His influence reached into his own family: his grandson, John Marshall Harlan II, later served on the Supreme Court, embodying the intergenerational dialogue that the elder Harlan's career had begun. More broadly, his work stands as a reminder that the Constitution's meaning is shaped not only by majorities but also by principled dissent. To students of law and history, he remains The Great Dissenter, a justice who believed that equal citizenship, national unity, and the rule of law must rise or fall together.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Justice - Equality - Humility.