Samuel D. Warren II

American lawyer and businessman (1852–1910)

Samuel Dennis Warren II (January 25, 1852 – February 18, 1910) was an American lawyer and businessman from Boston, Massachusetts.

Warren was born in Boston on January 25, 1852, the son of Susan Cornelia (née Clarke; 1825–1901) and Samuel Dennis Warren (1817–1888). His father and namesake founded the Cumberland Paper Mills in Maine. He had four siblings: Henry Clarke Warren (1854–1899), scholar of Sanskrit and Pali; Cornelia Lyman Warren (1857–1921), philanthropist; Edward Perry Warren (1860–1928), art collector; and Fredrick Fiske Warren (1862–1938), political radical and utopist. Warren graduated from the Boston Latin School, after which he entered Harvard College, earning his undergraduate degree in 1875. He graduated second in his class at Harvard Law School in 1877. The first place student was his friend Louis Brandeis, later a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Warren was editor of The Harvard Crimson.

Warren married Mabel Bayard, the eldest daughter of United States Senator from Delaware Thomas F. Bayard, at the Church of the Ascension in Washington, D. C., on January 25, 1883. The couple went on to have six children. It is "one of the most influential essays in the history of American law" and is widely regarded as the first publication in the United States to advocate a right to privacy, articulating that right primarily as a "right to be let alone" which referred to paragraph 11 of the 1868 law of the press of France. In 1899, he left law to oversee the family's paper production business. He managed the family trust established in May 1889 with the legal assistance of Brandeis to benefit his father's widow and 5 children. In 1906, Warren's brothers Edward and Fiske charged that Brandeis had structured the trust to benefit Samuel at the expense of his siblings. Warren served from 1902 to 1906 as president of the trustees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The New York Times reported that he died of apoplexy on February 20. The Warren Trust case became a point of contention during the 1916 Senate hearings on the confirmation of Brandeis to the Supreme Court, and it remains important for its explication of legal ethics and professional responsibility.