Woods, William B.

▪ United States jurist

in full  William Burnham Woods  

born Aug. 3, 1824, Newark, Ohio, U.S.

died May 14, 1887, Washington, D.C.

      associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1880–87).

      After being admitted to the bar in 1847, Woods entered private practice, in which he remained until the outbreak of the American Civil War. In the prewar years he served first as mayor of Newark and then as a state legislator. He joined the Union army in 1862 and saw action repeatedly, rising to the rank of brigadier general. His wartime experiences caused him to become a Republican, and he subsequently settled in Alabama, where he resumed his practice, engaged in cotton planting, and took an active role in Reconstruction activities. In 1869 he was appointed a judge of the Circuit Court for the fifth circuit by President Ulysses S. Grant (Grant, Ulysses S.) and moved to Atlanta.

      In 1880 Woods was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Rutherford B. Hayes (Hayes, Rutherford B.) to take the seat vacated by William Strong. In six years on the bench he wrote 218 opinions, many of them in patent and equity cases that revealed his rare ability to analyze cogently an intricate record. His two most memorable opinions were in Harris, which struck down the Ku Klux Klan Act on grounds that the government had no right, under the 14th Amendment, to regulate the activities of individuals, and in Presser v. Illinois, which declared that the Bill of Rights limited the power of the federal, but not a state, government. Both positions were later reversed.

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