Joseph Story 1779–1845

Joseph Story dominated the development of American law in the early-nineteenth-century United States. Appointed at age thirty-two, Story spent the rest of his lifetime on the Supreme Court, where he served over twenty years alongside Chief Justice John Marshall and nearly a decade alongside Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. From his position on the bench, Story participated in numerous decisions that established the broad outlines of constitutional jurisprudence, ranging from cases asserting the federal government’s supremacy, as in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), to ones defining the meaning of specific provisions such as the commerce clause, as in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), and the fugitive slave clause, as in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842). In these deliberations, Story advocated nationalist constitutional positions demanding that the states operate under a relative degree of federal restraint.