(b. Morristown, N.J., 5 Feb. 1858; d. Washington, D.C., 9 Dec. 1924; interred Evergreen Cemetery, Morristown), associate justice, 1912–1922. Mahlon Pitney was the second son of Henry Cooper Pitney and his wife Sarah Louisa (Halsted) Pitney. After graduating from the College of New Jersey in 1879, Mahlon “read” for the New Jersey bar without attending law school, then managed the family law practice. He was elected to Congress in 1894, serving two terms. A Republican leader in northern New Jersey, he won election to the state senate in 1898, becoming its president in 1901. Appointed associate justice of the state supreme court in 1901, he was elevated to chancellor, New Jersey's highest judicial post, in 1908, serving until 1912.
President William Howard Taft in 1912 appointed Pitney to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was confirmed 50 to 26, supported by Republican regulars and opposed by Democrats and progressive Republicans.
Justice Pitney wrote 274 opinions, 252 of them as spokesman for the Court; several of his opinions commanded national attention. His primary values were individualism and a belief in equality of opportunity unfettered by government meddling.
Pitney viewed the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments as means by which the spirit of individualism, and vested property rights, could be preserved. Illustrative was his dissenting opinion in Wilson v. New (1917), where he would have struck down on due process grounds an effort by Congress to fix an eight‐hour workday and temporary wage scale for interstate railway employees. However, he supported restraints on individual liberty when necessary to further its ultimate interests. Thus, in Pierce v. United States (1920), he rejected a claim to freedom of expression under the First Amendment presented by defendants prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 (see Espionage Acts). Because he perceived that individuality was often clearly subsumed by corporate activity, he supported the application of state and federal antitrust statutes, although in Eisner v. Macomber (1920), he held that the Sixteenth Amendment did not permit Congress to tax stock dividends as income.
Pitney believed that the right to contract was the essential expression of individual liberty. He read into the due process clauses a “liberty of contract” and he laid great stress on the Contracts Clause of Article 1 (see Contract, Freedom of). He worried that organized labor posed a menace to the individual, and he ruled against union interests in such case as Coppage v. Kansas (1915). But Pitney generally supported state prerogatives within America's federal system, upon which was also based his single expression of support for organized labor in his dissenting opinion in Truax v. Corrigan (1921). He was also sensitive to the vagaries of the industrial workplace, and his most enduring contribution to the development of American constitutional law was his support for state workmen's compensation statutes. In a series of cases beginning with New York Central Railroad Co. v. White (1917), he sustained several state laws holding employers liable to compensate individual employees for injuries suffered in the course of their employment Justice Louis Brandeis declared, “But for Pitney we would have had no workmen's compensation laws.”
Pitney resigned from the Court in December 1922 after suffering a stroke the previous August. He died two years later.
Bibliography
- Alan Ryder Breed,
Mahlon Pitney (B.A. thesis Princeton University, 1932)
— Robert David Stenzel
