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US Supreme Court justice from 1804 to 1834

William Johnson Jr. (December 27, 1771 – August 4, 1834) was an American attorney, state legislator, and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1804 until his death in 1834. When he was 32 years old, Johnson was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Thomas Jefferson. He was the first Jeffersonian Republican member of the Court as well as the second Justice from the state of South Carolina. During his tenure, Johnson restored the act of delivering seriatim opinions. He wrote about half of the dissents during the Marshall Court, leading historians to nickname him the "first dissenter". Johnson wrote the majority opinion for two major cases (including United States v. Hudson) and hundreds of majority opinions in minor admiralty, land, and insurance cases. He supported a strong federal government in economic matters, leading him to join the majority in cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland, Gibbons v. Ogden, and Fletcher v. Peck to the dismay of Jefferson and other Republicans. Johnson's strong federalist opinions while sitting as a circuit justice for the District of South Carolina made him a social pariah in his home state. In 1834, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he died later that year from surgery complications. Like most justices on the Marshall Court, Johnson's contributions to the law were overshadowed by Chief Justice John Marshall. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, Johnson's jurisprudence became a topic of limited scholarship.

Johnson was born in St. James Goose Creek Parish (now part of Berkeley County, South Carolina) to William Johnson Sr., a blacksmith who moved to South Carolina from New York, and Sarah Johnson, née Nightingale. Both of his parents were supporters of the American Revolution. During the Revolution, Johnson Sr. was considered by British authorities to be "one of the most dangerous and important of the rebels." Johnson Jr., alongside his brother and mother (who was also a revolutionary), subsequently fled to New York City, where they lived for the remainder of the Revolution. In 1790, William Johnson graduated from Princeton University first in his class. Three years later, he passed the bar after tutelage under Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Johnson was an adherent of the Democratic Republican Party, and he represented Charleston in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1794 to 1800. In his last term, from 1798 to 1800, he served as Speaker of the House. In 1799, Johnson helped pass a bill to reorganize the state judiciary. Later that year, he was also appointed an associate justice of the state Court of General Sessions and Common Pleas, a position created by Johnson's reorganization. The service on that court also included a position on the state Constitutional Court, the highest court in the state at the time. The couple had eight children together, six of whom survived. They also adopted two refugees from Santo Domingo. While on the Supreme Court, Johnson owned slaves. and was sworn into office on May 7, 1804. Jefferson nominated the 32 year old Johnson because he was from a similar geographic region as Moore, because Johnson's health would allow him to travel regularly (a requirement of the position at the time), and because Johnson adhered to republican principles. He was the first member of the Court who was not a Federalist. During his tenure, Johnson wrote the majority opinion for only two major cases: United States v. Hudson and Goodwin in 1812, and Mechanics' Bank of Alexandria v. Bank of Columbia in 1820. In U. S. v. Hudson, the Court held that federal courts lacked the power to develop common law crimes, a decision which was celebrated by Jeffersonians. However, in Mechanics' Bank, the Court established federal common law precedent that a federal judge could hear parol evidence to explain a written contractual agreement if the agreement's meaning was ambiguous. Johnson also wrote over a hundred majority opinions for "arcane land, admiralty, and insurance cases" as well as numerous concurrences.

Following the Chesapeake–Leopard affair in 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed the Embargo Act, which "expressly granted discretion to the state port collectors to detain any ship that appeared to be violating, or attempting to violate, the embargo." In 1808, shipowner Adam Gilchrist filed a mandamus action with the circuit court after his ship was detained following the direction of Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin. In Gilchrist v. Collector of Charleston (1808), Johnson, presiding over the court, ruled that "the collector’s actions would not be justified by Gallatin’s letter because in the embargo act Congress did not sanction the President (or the Department of Treasury) with the discretion to detain ships." The case resulted in immediate backlash. While the Federalist press celebrated the decision, it remained unpopular with the majority of citizens. Between July and October 1808, Johnson publicly debated the decision with Attorney General Caesar Augustus Rodney in a series of letters published in Charleston newspapers. Ultimately, the Jefferson administration believed that the circuit court did not have the right to enforce a writ of mandamus. However, the case remains an important yet often forgotten judicial landmark that helped establish judicial independence. The decision, Johnson's first major act of independence, was not appreciated by Jefferson. The two men stopped corresponding for a number of years after Gilchrist, and their friendship did not rekindle until Johnson restored their correspondence by offering "rare botanical seeds" to Jefferson. It was the first time the Supreme Court ruled a state law as such. Johnson wrote a concurrence in Fletcher. He did not disagree with the Court's overall holding, but he feared the case may have been "feigned" due to possible collusion between the parties in order to establish precedent. Uncharacteristically, Johnson did not write a separate opinion in the case. Green v. Biddle was one of the Court's most important Contract Clause cases of the era, further expanding the clause to include public agreements such as the Virginia Kentucky compact of 1792. In 1827, Johnson joined Justice Bushrod Washington's majority opinion in Ogden v. Saunders (1827). The opinion held that the Contract Clause barred only retrospective laws affecting contracts, not prospective laws affecting contracts not yet signed. It was the only constitutional case in which Chief Justice Marshall ever dissented. In that case, the Supreme Court, using powers bestowed to it in the Judiciary Act of 1789, held that Virginia had improperly divested a family of title and reversed the state court. In 1816, the Supreme Court answered the defiance of the Court of Appeals of Virginia in Martin v. Hunter's Lessee. In Martin, Justice Joseph Story wrote for a unanimous court that "the appellate power of the United States does extend to cases pending in the State courts, and that the 25th section of the judiciary act, which authorizes the exercise of this jurisdiction in the specified cases by a writ of error, is supported by the letter and spirit of the Constitution." McCulloch established that states could not interfere with the federal government's execution of constitutional powers and that the Necessary and Proper Clause gives Congress implied powers that are not enumerated in the U. S. Constitution. Two years later, in 1821, Johnson joined the unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice Marshall in Cohens v. Virginia, which held that the Supreme Court had the ability to review state criminal proceedings. Johnson openly questioned the fairness of the resulting trial. Johnson was not alone in his criticism. Governor Thomas Bennett criticized the proceedings for being unfair since the trials were held privately, and the accused were not present when witnesses testified. The criticism from both Governor Bennett and Justice Johnson outraged members of the court trying the alleged plotters. In July 1822, the members published a rebuttal in the Charleston Courier, and the arrests and executions more than doubled. After Denmark Vesey's arrest and trial, the South Carolina legislature amended the Negro Seaman's Act of 1820 to remove the exception for "free negro or mulatto seamen" from being temporarily arrested and imprisoned while their ship ported. Johnson feared that the case would lead to creditor ship owners leaving free seamen in jail to avoid paying wages, as well as lead to other bans based on racial classification. In the case of Elkison v. Deliesseline (1822), Johnson, presiding over his duties on the Circuit Court for the District of South Carolina, found that "the transfer of commerce and treaty powers to the national government eliminated state authority to enact conflicting legislation" and therefore invalidated the statute. It was the first time since 1789 that a federal court invalidated state legislation because of its conflict with the Commerce Clause and South Carolina nullified the ruling.

In 1824, the Marshall Court unanimously held in Gibbons v. Ogden that the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution gave the federal government the right to regulate instrumentalities of commerce. In the majority opinion, Marshall held that a federal licensing law expressed Congress's intent to regulate steamboat commerce and that it invalidated a New York law creating a steamboat monopoly. In contrast, in Johnson's concurring opinion, he uncompromisingly argued that it was the federal government's exclusive power regardless of federal licensing laws. He further stated that because "[c]ommerce, in its simplest signification, means an exchange of goods", societal advances would lead to various mediums of exchange (such as labor and intelligence) entering into commerce, and therefore becoming "the objects of [federal] commercial regulation." In 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited the concurrence in his majority opinion for South Dakota v. Wayfair Inc. and wrote that had Johnson's view "prevailed and States been denied the power of concurrent regulation, history might have seen sweeping federal regulations at an early date that foreclosed the States from experimentation with laws and policies of their own "

The Georgia Gold Rush in the early 1830s led to two important cases regarding Native American sovereignty that Johnson heard on the bench. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Cherokee Nation sought an injunction preventing Georgia from utilizing a series of laws to strip them of their rights and their land, asserting the laws violated treaties that the Nation had signed with the United States. The Court held that it did not have jurisdiction because "an Indian tribe or nation within the United States is not a foreign state in the sense of the constitution, and cannot maintain an action in the courts of the United States". In Johnson's concurrence, he stated that Indian tribes were "nothing more than wandering hordes, held together only by ties of blood and habit, and having neither rules nor government beyond what is required in a savage state."

Johnson was a pioneer of judicial restraint and believed that the legislature and executive branch had a "superior competency and fitness" to deal with evolving problems. His jurisprudence relied on the idea of personal sovereignty enforced by legislation. While he believed an independent judiciary was important, he also believed that the legislature had the right to control the courts in order to protect its own sovereignty. Johnson's view on expanding federal jurisdiction, as seen in his lone dissent in Osborn v. Bank of the United States (1824), also differed from the Chief Justice's. In 1807, Chief Justice Marshall, writing for the majority of the Court, granted two men who were implicated in the Burr conspiracy a writ of habeas corpus in Ex parte Bollman. Johnson dissented from the Marshall opinion, stating that the Supreme Court lacked both original and appellate jurisdiction and that the Judiciary Act did not give the Court the ability to issue the writ. According to one historian, Johnson "valued commonsense argument, factual and doctrinal accuracy, solid annotation, and full disclosure of the circumstances of the case." The volume was ultimately a financial and critical failure at the time. One contemporary critic ridiculed it by stating that the book had a "poor developed arraignment of topics, an improper use of obscene sentences, and a dismal failure in its use of affected language." Several other historians have theorized that Johnson's political attachment to Jefferson was due in part to the power of Jefferson's recommendation and introduction to publishers. he died.

Like most other Justices on the Marshall Court, Johnson's contributions to the Supreme Court were eclipsed by the chief justice. Until the 1950s and 1960s, scholarship on Justice Johnson was almost nonexistent. However, further research on Johnson has been inhibited by limited access to historical documents as families from South Carolina rarely preserved family papers.