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.
Joseph Rucker Lamar is the second Georgia Lamar to reach the Court — a distant kinsman of L. Q. C. Lamar (§49) — and one of its quieter figures: a courtly Augusta lawyer and scholar of Georgia legal history, named by Taft in 1910, dead barely five years later in 1916. In his short tenure he wrote a notable labor-contempt decision and served on the international commission that mediated between the United States and Mexico at Niagara Falls. His only biography is the loving memoir his widow published a decade after his death. Start there, read Gompers, and set him in the White Court.
The Bookshelf
The one full life, written by the justice's widow ten years after his death. It is a memoir, not a modern biography — affectionate, discreet, and shaped by devotion — but it is also the indispensable and nearly the only source for the man: the Augusta boyhood, the partnership and friendship with the Georgia bar, the codification and legal-history work that made his early reputation, the brief service on the state supreme court, and Taft's surprising 1910 appointment of a Southern Democrat. Clarinda Lamar is especially good on the 1914 Niagara Falls mediation, which she witnessed. Read it as a period document as much as a biography.
Lamar's most consequential opinion. The American Federation of Labor had defied an injunction against boycotting the Buck's Stove company, and Samuel Gompers and other labor leaders were held in contempt. Lamar's opinion for the Court set out the difference between civil and criminal contempt and reversed the convictions on procedural grounds while leaving the injunction power intact — a careful, technical decision at the center of the era's great struggle over labor injunctions. A window on the labor-law battles that ran through the whole Progressive-era Court. Free online.
The Holmes Devise volume for the White Court Lamar joined in 1911. He is a minor presence in Bickel and Schmidt's account — a five-year tenure leaves a thin trail — but the volume supplies the docket and the colleagues, the commerce and labor and civil-liberties cases, that give a short-serving justice his setting. The era anchor for a life the fuller literature barely records. Macmillan.
For a justice whose only biography is his widow's memoir, the Supreme Court Historical Society's illustrated volume is the reliable modern short account — the Georgia career, the codification work, the Taft appointment, the Niagara mediation, the early death — in a few well-sourced pages with a portrait. The best compact, citable life. CQ Press for the SCHS.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Clarinda Lamar's Life — for the man himself, from the one who knew him best
- 2.Gompers v. Buck's Stove — for his most consequential opinion, in the labor-injunction wars
- 3.The SCHS Illustrated Biographies — for the reliable modern capsule life
- 4.Bickel & Schmidt — for the White Court he briefly served
Where the Papers Are Kept
The Joseph Rucker and Clarinda Pendleton Lamar papers at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Library hold the couple's correspondence and materials, the richest source for the justice and the base for his widow's biography. Additional material survives in Georgia repositories. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The two Georgia Lamars. Joseph Rucker Lamar and L. Q. C. Lamar (§49) were distant cousins from the same Georgia clan, both on the Supreme Court within a generation — one an ex-Confederate cabinet officer and orator, the other a quiet codifier and scholar. Compare the two Lamars and what each tells us about the New South's path back to national power through the Court.
- The justice as diplomat. In 1914 President Wilson sent the sitting Justice Lamar to Niagara Falls as an American mediator in the 'ABC Powers' conference that helped avert war with Mexico. Examine the propriety and the precedent of a justice serving in active diplomacy — a line that runs to Robert Jackson at Nuremberg and Owen Roberts on the Pearl Harbor commission — and what it says about the older, more porous boundary between Court and government.
- The scholar-codifier. Before the Court, Lamar's reputation rested on his work codifying Georgia law and writing its legal history. Recover the antebellum-to-Progressive tradition of the lawyer-scholar-codifier that produced him, and ask what was lost when the path to the Court narrowed to litigation and politics. Seat lineage: Moody §60 → Joseph Lamar → Brandeis §67.