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John Marshall Harlan

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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JOHN MARSHALL HARLAN (1833-), American jurist, was born in Boyle county, Kentucky, on the 1st of June 1833. He graduated at Centre College, Danville, Ky., in 1850, and at the law department of Transylvania University, Lexington, in 1853. He was county judge of Franklin county in 1858-1859, was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress on the Whig ticket in 1859, and was elector on the Constitutional Union ticket in 1860. On the outbreak of the Civil War he recruited and organized the Tenth Kentucky United States Volunteer Infantry, and in1861-1863served as colonel. Retiring from the army in 1863, he was elected by the Union party attorney-general of the state, and was re-elected in 1865, serving from 1863 to 1867, when he removed to Louisville to practise law. He was the Republican candidate for governor in 1871 and in 1875, and was a member of the commission which was appointed by President Hayes early in 1877 to accomplish the recognition of one or other of the existing state governments of Louisiana; and he was a member of the Bering Sea tribunal which met in Paris in 1893. On the 29th of November 1877 he became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. In this position he showed himself a liberal constructionist. In opinions on the Civil Rights cases and in the interpretation of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, he dissented from the majority of the court and advocated increasing the power of the Federal government. He supported the constitutionality of the income tax clause in the Wilson Tariff Bill of 1894, and he drafted the decision of the court in the Northern Securities Company Case, which applied to railways the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. In 1889 he became a professor in the Law School of the Columbian University (afterwards George Washington University) in Washington, D.C.