(b. near Attica, N.Y., 6 Jan. 1824; d. Ann Arbor, Mich., 12 Sep. 1898), treatise writer and jurist. Cooley was an important figure in the growth of the University of Michigan and its law school. Elected to the Michigan Supreme Court in 1864, he served with distinction there for twenty years. In 1887 President Grover Cleveland appointed Cooley to the newly created Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). Though Cooley was disappointed in not being nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, he had no inclination for private law practice.

In 1868, Cooley published the influential Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union. His discussion of due process in that treatise and his denial that individuals could arbitrarily be “deprived of liberty in particulars of primary importance to his or their ‘pursuit of happiness’” have been interpreted as an authoritative source for judicial protection of property rights, as well as a source for the doctrine of liberty of contract (see Contract, Freedom of).

Such a laissez‐faire interpretation misses the persistence of democratic values in Cooley's writings, as his opinions for the Michigan Supreme Court indicate. Cooley was troubled by the growing concentration of corporate power in the late nineteenth century. His suspicion of any kind of arbitrary power, coupled with his democratic values, made him an ambivalent critic of the collusion between corporate and legislative power. On the ICC, he sought to umpire relations between railroads and the federal government. Cooley's conservatism reflected a nostalgia for the simpler Jeffersonian world of preindustrial America.

— Alan R. Jones

The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States. Copyright © 1992, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.