Pierce Butler was the first Minnesotan to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme Court. His nearly seventeen years there (1923–1939) followed three decades as one of the most successful trial lawyers in early twentieth-century Minnesota. He was a prosecutor, railroad lawyer, litigator for hire, and University of Minnesota regent. Some of his work, including his opposition to minimum wage laws, remains controversial.
Pierce Butler was born to Irish immigrants on a farm near Northfield, Minnesota, in 1866. He graduated from Carleton College in 1887, read law in St. Paul for a year, then went into practice. Elected Ramsey County attorney in 1893, he prosecuted the killers Otto Wonnigkeit and Charles Ermisch, resulting in the only double execution in Ramsey County history in 1894.
Butler spent a quarter century, 1897 to 1923, mostly in service of the railroad industry. He was in great demand for his skill in the arcane fields of railroad regulation and asset valuation, first as general attorney to the Omaha Railroad, then in private practice. Over six feet tall and burly, he won a reputation as an intimidating courtroom warrior.
The Taft administration twice called on Butler to prosecute businesses, first the milling industry under the Pure Food Act, then the nation’s leading meat packers under the Sherman Antitrust Act. His greatest victory took place in St. Paul, where he persuaded the federal district court to declare Minnesota’s railroad rate regulation unconstitutional. This victory was later undone by the US Supreme Court.
During World War I Butler leveraged institutional power against those he deemed insufficiently patriotic. As a University of Minnesota regent (1907-1923), he engineered the firing of political science professor William A. Schaper, whom he called “the Kaiser’s man,” for not “boosting” the war effort in his classes. As a lawyer he defended prominent citizens of Luverne, Minnesota, who kidnapped, threatened with death, and tarred and feathered John Meints. They did it, Butler argued, to protect Meints from even worse consequences of his disloyalty. Butler won the case, but on appeal his defense was ruled illegitimate.
Former President Taft got to know Butler and was impressed by him during important railroad valuation hearings in Canada in 1921. When Taft became chief justice, he recommended Butler for the Supreme Court to President Harding. Butler joined the court in January 1923.
Most scholars have described Butler’s Supreme Court service as undistinguished and devoted to protecting the wealth of the wealthy. He wrote over 300 majority opinions, almost all for uncontroversial cases. Only a handful of his opinions and dissents are remembered now.
In Buck v. Bell, the court approved Virginia’s program of sterilizing women deemed by the state to be “genetically defective.” Justice Holmes wrote of Carrie Buck, her mother, and her daughter, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Only Pierce Butler dissented, but he declined to state his reasons.
In Olmstead v. United States he wrote, again on the losing side, that the Fourth Amendment should be interpreted to ban government telephone wiretaps if done without a search warrant. His reasoning was adopted forty years later in Katz v. US.
In Powell v. Alabama, the Scottsboro Boys case, he dissented again. Eight innocent Black teenagers had been sentenced to death for rape after rushed trials before all-white juries, their lawyers given no time to prepare. By a vote of 7-2 the Supreme Court overturned their convictions. Butler, who knew from experience the importance of trial preparation, found no defect in the proceedings.
Butler was one of the “Four Horsemen” justices who opposed the New Deal. In 1936 he wrote the majority opinion in a 5-4 case, Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, which declared a New York minimum wage law unconstitutional. Government, he wrote, had no power to set wages. Coming as the seventh in a series of cases striking down New Deal-era legislation, Tipaldo set off President Roosevelt’s so-called “court-packing plan” to add six seats to the Supreme Court.
Roosevelt lost that battle—the worst legislative defeat of his presidency. However, just nine months after Tipaldo, the Supreme Court reversed the decision in a minimum wage case called West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. Butler’s opinion in Tipaldo had been based on his concept of “freedom of contract,” the idea that the state should not intervene in contracts between employers and their employees. In Parrish, Chief Justice Hughes wrote that “the Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract,” sweeping aside Butler’s way of thinking. Pierce Butler died of leukemia on November 16, 1939.
Editor’s note: Pierce Butler Route in St. Paul is named after Pierce Butler Jr., the son of the justice.