{"id":699835,"date":"2026-06-12T14:14:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/699835\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T14:14:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:14:09","slug":"court-considers-nitrogen-gas-execution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/699835\/","title":{"rendered":"Court considers nitrogen gas execution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, Justice David Brewer may not be particularly well known, but that wasn\u2019t always the case. Among his other activities, Brewer made an (unsuccessful) trip to Colorado in search of gold, served on the Supreme Court alongside his uncle (the only instance to date of two relatives sitting on the bench simultaneously), and was \u2013 at the time \u2013 \u201cunquestionably the Justice most familiar to the American public<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brewer was born in June 1837, in Smyrna, Asia Minor (the former Ottoman Empire, now Turkey) \u2013 one of only six justices<\/a> in the court\u2019s history to have been born outside of the United States. His father was a reverend and ran a missionary school in Smyrna, while his mother was the sister<\/a> of one of Brewer\u2019s eventual colleagues on the Supreme Court, Stephen J. Field. The family returned to the U.S. when Brewer was still relatively young and settled<\/a> in Connecticut. He enrolled at Wesleyan College at 14<\/a>, transferred to Yale after two years, and graduated in 1856. While at Yale, Brewer was \u201cgreatly influenced<\/a>\u201c by Theodore Dwight Woolsey<\/a>, Yale\u2019s president and a political science scholar, who believed in individual \u201cmoral self-development<\/a>\u201c and that this was one of the central goals of government.<\/p>\n

After Yale, Brewer spent a year in New York City reading law at the office of his uncle, David Dudley Field, before receiving a degree from Albany Law School in 1858. Brewer then tried his luck in the Colorado goldfields<\/a>, found none, and moved to Kansas<\/a> in 1859 before serving in a number of judicial roles \u2013 circuit court commissioner, probate court judge, and state district court judge. In 1870<\/a> Brewer was elected to the Kansas Supreme Court, where he remained for 14 years before President Chester Arthur appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in 1884<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Benjamin Harrison then nominated Brewer in December 1889<\/a> to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Stanley Matthews, and the Senate confirmed him 53-11<\/a> later that month. He was sworn in on Jan. 6, 1890, joining the court with his uncle, Stephen Field, who had been sitting since 1863.<\/p>\n

On the court, Brewer authored 540 majority opinions, a total surpassed by only five justices<\/a> at the time of his death in 1910. Simultaneously, he was the Fuller court\u2019s leading dissenter, averaging<\/a> 11.3 dissents per term \u2013 and in the process beat out even John Marshall Harlan (who averaged 11.1), the \u201cGreat Dissenter.\u201d Brewer\u2019s jurisprudence linked him, in the eyes of historians, to what is now known as the Lochner era<\/a> \u2014 a period of Supreme Court history named after the 1905 case of Lochner v. New York<\/a>, in which the court frequently struck down economic regulations on the grounds that they infringed on the individual right to the freedom of contract. Specifically, in Lochner, five justices (including Brewer) held that a New York law capping bakers\u2019 working hours violated the 14th Amendment\u2019s protections.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Brewer\u2019s best-known<\/a> majority opinion came in the unanimous case of Muller v. Oregon<\/a>, which upheld Oregon\u2019s cap on women\u2019s working hours; his reasoning rested partly on women\u2019s physical differences from men, writing that \u201chistory discloses the fact that woman has always been dependent upon man.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notably, Brewer also dissented in two major Chinese exclusion cases. The first, Fong Yue Ting v. United States<\/a>, challenged the Geary Act of 1892<\/a>, which required Chinese residents to carry residency certificates or face deportation. Brewer dissented, joined by Chief Justice Melville Fuller and Field, on the grounds that, among other things, such persons were constitutionally entitled to due process and that the act deprived them of this. The second case, United States v. Ju Toy<\/a>, upheld the denial of re-entry to a U.S. citizen of Chinese dissent who had traveled temporarily abroad. Brewer again dissented, arguing that barring a citizen \u2013 guilty of no crime \u2013 from returning home without a jury trial stripped him of his constitutional protections, and that Congress could not constitutionally deprive a citizen of the rights the Constitution guarantees.<\/p>\n

As for Plessy v. Ferguson<\/a>, which was decided while Brewer served on the court, he did not participate<\/a>; his daughter died unexpectedly the day the case was argued and he left Washington to be with his family.<\/p>\n

Off the bench, Brewer was an orator and writer<\/a>, giving lectures to bar associations, church congregations, and all-Black colleges \u2013 and at one point took leave of his court position to serve as president of the Venezuela-British Guiana Border Commission. As such, his name appeared in newspapers more frequently<\/a> than those of either Fuller or even Harlan (although after his death, his eulogists wrote<\/a> that his \u201cfame was largely the product of his love of public speaking and his willingness to go almost anywhere to address an audience.\u201d) Brewer died in office<\/a> in March 1910 of a heart attack, at the age of 72, after 20 years on the court. His body was brought back to Kansas, where he was buried<\/a>, and he was succeeded by Justice Charles Evans Hughes.<\/p>\n

Brewer\u2019s reputation after his death faced some difficulties. Theodore Roosevelt privately dismissed<\/a> him as \u201ca menace to the welfare of the Nation\u201d and (less charitably) a judge with \u201ca sweetbread for a brain.\u201d The two men had clashed openly during Brewer\u2019s final years on the bench \u2013 Brewer publicly criticized<\/a> Roosevelt\u2019s imperialism and had openly called into question whether Roosevelt was suited to hold the presidency. Generations of historians, too, associated Brewer<\/a> with the disfavored Lochner Era and moved on. That said, his voting record tells a somewhat different story: in 739 cases involving \u201cchallenges to the legitimacy of state regulation<\/a>,\u201d Brewer sided with the state nearly 80% of the time, and while on the Kansas Supreme Court, he had warned<\/a> that the nation\u2019s large corporations would soon be \u201cwrestling for political power and control.\u201d Brewer was a complicated man, and a complicated justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, Justice David Brewer may not be particularly well known, but that wasn\u2019t always the case. Among his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":699836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-699835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/699836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}