Joseph Story

Joseph Story (September 18, 1779 – September 10, 1845) was an American lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1811 to 1845. He is most remembered today for his opinions in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and The Amistad, along with his magisterial Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, first published in 1833. Dominating the field in the 19th century, this work is one of the chief cornerstones of early American jurisprudence. It is the first comprehensive treatise ever written on the U.S. Constitution, and remains a great source of historical information of the formation and early struggles to define the American republic.

Story had opposed Jacksonian democracy and said it was "oppression" of property rights by republican governments when popular majorities in the 1830s began to restrict and erode the property rights of the minority of rich men. R. Kent Newmyer presents Story as a "Statesman of the Old Republic" who tried to be above democratic politics and to shape the law in accordance with the republicanism of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, as well as the New England Whigs of the 1820s and 1830s such as Daniel Webster. Historians agree that Justice Story—as much or more than Marshall or anyone else—reshaped American law in a conservative direction that protected property rights.