This justice’s story is told through the reading shelf: the best accounts of the life and the tenure are mapped, with recommendations, under Go Deeper.
This justice’s story is told through the reading shelf: the best accounts of the life and the tenure are mapped, with recommendations, under Go Deeper.
The opinions that defined this tenure are cited, with context, on the reading shelf — see the Go Deeper tab for the cases and the books that tell their story.
William Rufus Day is the small, frail Ohioan — McKinley's confidant and Secretary of State, who negotiated the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War before Theodore Roosevelt put him on the Court — remembered for two opinions that pull in opposite directions: Weeks v. United States (1914), which gave federal courts the exclusionary rule, and Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), which struck down the federal child-labor law. His one book-length study is Joseph McLean's 1946 biography. Start there, read the two opinions, and set him in the era.
The Bookshelf
The only book-length life, from a Johns Hopkins study — a slim, careful account of a genuinely modest man. McLean traces the Ravenna and Canton lawyer, the intimate friendship with William McKinley that made Day first a diplomat (chief of the commission that negotiated the 1898 Treaty of Paris, ceding the Philippines and Puerto Rico) and then, under Roosevelt, a justice. Day was physically slight and personally retiring — he loathed Washington society and slipped home to Ohio whenever he could — and McLean's portrait matches the man: unshowy, conscientious, easy to underrate. The base account, if a dated one.
Day's most enduring opinion, and the origin of a rule that still shapes every criminal case. Holding that evidence seized by federal officers in violation of the Fourth Amendment must be excluded from federal court, Day gave the amendment teeth it had never had — a remedy, not just a right. The federal exclusionary rule of Weeks would be extended to the states in Mapp v. Ohio (1961) and fought over ever since. One quiet 1914 opinion at the root of a century of search-and-seizure law. Free online.
Day's most criticized opinion, and the other pole of his record. For a 5–4 Court he struck down the federal law barring the products of child labor from interstate commerce, holding that Congress could regulate commerce but not the conditions of production — a crabbed reading that drew a famous Holmes (§58) dissent and stood as a barrier to national reform until Darby overruled it in 1941. That the author of the pro-liberty exclusionary rule also wrote the anti-reform child-labor decision is the puzzle of a justice harder to categorize than he looks. Free online.
Day's tenure (1903–1922) straddles two Holmes Devise volumes, and both frame his record: Fiss's Troubled Beginnings for the late Fuller Court, Bickel and Schmidt's The Judiciary and Responsible Government for the White Court where Weeks and Hammer fall. Bickel and Schmidt are the fullest guide to the commerce-clause and criminal-procedure questions Day's two famous opinions decided. Macmillan.
The only substantial Day scholarship since the 1946 biography — a study of a problem Day lived daily: his sons practiced before the Court, and his recusal practice became an early case study in judicial-family ethics.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.McLean — for the one full life — the diplomat who became a justice
- 2.Weeks v. United States — for the exclusionary rule at its origin
- 3.Hammer v. Dagenhart — for the child-labor decision and Holmes's dissent (§58)
- 4.Bickel & Schmidt — for the White Court that decided both
Where the Papers Are Kept
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The exclusionary rule from Day to now. Weeks (1914) invented the federal exclusionary remedy; trace it to Mapp v. Ohio (1961), which imposed it on the states, and to the modern good-faith exceptions that have narrowed it. Day's quiet 1914 opinion is the headwater of the most-litigated question in American criminal law.
- The two-faced record. Reconcile the Day of Weeks (expanding a constitutional right against the government) with the Day of Hammer v. Dagenhart (blocking Congress from ending child labor). Is there a coherent principle — a strict formalism about spheres of power — or is he simply a conventional conservative caught between his instincts?
- The diplomat-justices. Day negotiated the treaty that made the United States an empire, then joined the Court that decided what the Constitution owed the new territories (the Insular Cases — Brown §52, White §55). Trace the small club of justices who came to the bench from high diplomatic or cabinet office (Chase §39 from Treasury, Day and McKenna §57 from the cabinet, later Byrnes §81) and what that path brought to their judging. Seat lineage: Shiras §53 → Day → Butler.