James Clark McReynolds (February 3, 1862 – August 24, 1946) was an American lawyer and judge from Tennessee who served as United States Attorney General under President Woodrow Wilson and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He served on the Court from 1914 to his retirement in 1941. McReynolds is best known today for his sustained opposition to the domestic programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and for his abrasive and dislikeable personality, which his contemporaries mostly viewed negatively and included documented elements of overt antisemitism and racism.
Born in Elkton, Kentucky, McReynolds practiced law in Tennessee after graduating from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as the U.S. Assistant Attorney General during President Theodore Roosevelt's administration and became well known for his skill in antitrust cases. After Wilson took office in 1913, he appointed McReynolds as his administration's first attorney general. Wilson nominated McReynolds to the Supreme Court in 1914 to fill the vacancy caused by Associate Justice Horace Harmon Lurton's death.
In his 26 years on the bench, McReynolds wrote 506 majority opinions for the Court and 157 dissents, 93 of which were against the New Deal. He was part of the "Four Horsemen" bloc of conservative justices who frequently voted to strike down New Deal programs. He assumed senior status in 1941 and was succeeded by James F. Byrnes. During his Supreme Court tenure, McReynolds wrote the majority opinion in cases such as Meyer v. Nebraska, United States v. Miller, Adams v. Tanner, and Pierce v. Society of Sisters. Due to his temperament, bigotry, and his opposition to the domestic programs of the FDR administration, McReynolds is sometimes included on lists of the worst Supreme Court justices by progressive-leaning thinkers.
Born in Elkton, Kentucky, the county seat of Todd County, McReynolds was the son of John Oliver and Ellen (née Reeves) McReynolds, both members of the Disciples of Christ church. John Oliver McReynolds was active in business ventures and served as a surgeon in the Confederate army during the Civil War. The house where James Clark McReynolds was born still stands; it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. He graduated from the prestigious Green River Academy and later matriculated at Vanderbilt University, graduating with status one year later as a valedictorian in 1882. At the University of Virginia School of Law, where he studied under John B. Minor, "a man of stern morality and firm conservative convictions", McReynolds completed his studies in 14 months. He again graduated at the head of his class, receiving his law degree in 1884.
McReynolds was secretary to U.S. Senator Howell E. Jackson, who became an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1893. He practiced law in Nashville and served for three years as an adjunct professor of commercial law, insurance, and corporations at Vanderbilt University Law School.
McReynolds became active in politics, running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1896 as a "Goldbug" Democrat. As head of the Tennessee delegation to the 1896 Democratic National Convention, he wrote the party's "sound money" plank. Under Theodore Roosevelt, McReynolds served as Assistant Attorney General from 1903 to 1907, when he resigned to take up private practice with the law firm of Guthrie, Cravath, and Henderson (later renamed Cravath, Swaine & Moore) in New York City.
While in private practice, McReynolds was retained by the government in matters relating to enforcement of antitrust laws. He litigated against the "tobacco trust" in United States v. American Tobacco Co. and against a monopoly over anthracite coal in United States v. Reading Co. In recognition of his "trust busting" credentials, Wilson appointed McReynolds as the 48th United States Attorney General on March 15, 1913, and he served until his accession to the Supreme Court in August 1914. His abrasive personality was understood to be a factor in his short tenure.
On August 19, 1914, Wilson nominated McReynolds as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, to succeed Horace H. Lurton. The United States Senate confirmed him on August 29, by a 44–6 vote, and he was sworn into office on October 12.
When the Supreme Court Building opened in 1935 during the Great Depression, McReynolds, like most of the other justices, refused to move his office into the new building. He continued to work out of the office he maintained in his apartment. He said that, with the country in economic turmoil, the government should not have spent so much money on a single building.
In his 27 years on the bench, McReynolds wrote 506 decisions, an average of just under 19 opinions for each term of the Court during his tenure. In addition, he authored 157 dissents, 93 of which were against the New Deal.
McReynolds's fierce opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal legislation designed to provide relief to citizens and put people to work, but which greatly expanded the scope of the federal government during the Great Depression, resulted in his being classified as one of the "Four Horsemen", along with George Sutherland, Willis Van Devanter and Pierce Butler. McReynolds voted to strike down the Tennessee Valley Authority in Ashwander v. TVA, the National Industrial Recovery Act in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 in United States v. Butler, the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935 in Carter v. Carter Coal Co., and the Social Security Act, 42 U.S.C. § 301 et seq., in Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548 (1937). He continued to vote against New Deal measures after most of the Court shifted in 1937 to upholding New Deal legislation. Howard Ball called McReynolds "the most strident Court critic of Roosevelt's New Deal programs".
As a confirmed opponent of federal authority aimed toward social ends or economic regulation, McReynolds had the "single-minded passion of a zealot". He was a "firm believer in laissez-faire economic theory", which he said was constitutionally enshrined. After the "Lochner era" ended in 1937—the Court's "switch in time that saved nine"—McReynolds became a dissenter. Unchanging through his 1941 retirement, his dissents continued to decry the federal government's exercises of power. In Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548 (1937), he dissented from a decision upholding the Social Security Act. He wrote: "I can not find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States".
McReynolds wrote two early decisions using the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil liberties: Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925). Meyer involved a state law that restricted the teaching of modern foreign languages in schools. Meyer, who taught German in a Lutheran school, was convicted under this law. In overturning the conviction on substantive due process grounds, McReynolds wrote that the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment included an individual's right "to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, to establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, and generally to enjoy privileges, essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men". These two decisions survived the post-Lochner era.
Pierce involved a challenge to a law forbidding parents to send their children to any but public schools. McReynolds wrote the opinion for a unanimous Court, holding that the Act violated the liberty of parents to direct the education of their children: "the fundamental liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only". These decisions were revived long after McReynolds left the bench, to buttress the Court's announcement of a constitutional right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), and later the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).