Hayes Administration - Hayes and the Judiciary

Hayes and the Judiciary

President Hayes made two appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. By far his most important appointment was his first, Kentuckian John Marshall Harlan. Harlan believed as Hayes did in expanding the role of the federal government, in defending the civil rights of individuals including African Americans within states, and in restraining monopoly power in the economy. Harlan dissented from the opinions of his fellow justices so often that he earned the nickname, "the Great Dissenter." His most famous dissent came in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which sanctioned the growing movement to allow segregation of citizens on public accommodations like railroads, as long as equal but separate facilities were provided. This policy of Jim Crow, legally supported segregation of the races, lasted in law until the key twentieth-century case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), where the Court relied on Harlan's...

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