BLAIR, JOHN, JR.

BLAIR, JOHN, JR.

John Blair Jr., was among the original members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Nominated by President GEORGE WASHINGTON, Blair began his term as an associate justice shortly after the Court’s establishment on February 2, 1790. Considered a fair-minded, incorruptible jurist, he remained on the bench for six years.

Blair was born in 1732 into a wealthy, wellestablished Virginia family. His parents were John Blair Sr., a public official with important political connections, and Mary Munro (or Monro) Blair, whose father was a rector in Virginia’s St. John’s Parish. In 1754, Blair graduated from the College ofWilliam and Mary (founded by his great-uncle), and he then studied law at Oxford’s Middle Temple, in London.

In 1756 Blair returned to Virginia with his Scottish wife, Jean Balfour, and began a successful law practice in Williamsburg. He served in the House of Burgesses as a representative of William and Mary from 1766 to 1770. (The House of Burgesses was a colonial assembly of elected officials and the governor.) He served as clerk of the governor’s council from 1770 to 1775. Blair attended the Virginia Constitutional Convention and the Virginia PRIVY COUNCIL in
1776. (The Privy Council was an advisory group to the English monarchy.)

Before his ascension to the U.S. Supreme
Court, Blair performed judicial duties for various
state courts. He became a judge on the
newly established Virginia General Court in
1778. In 1780, he became chancellor of the high
court of chancery and was appointed to Virginia’s
first court of appeals.

In the 1782 chancery case Commonwealth v.
Caton, 8 Va. (4 Call) 5, Blair concluded that
courts were entitled to review state legislation
and to invalidate any laws found unconstitutional.
The legal concept of judicial review—
whereby the courts examine legislative acts and
determine their constitutionality—was later
embraced fully by the U.S. Supreme Court, in
the landmark case MARBURY V. MADISON, 5 U.S.
137, 2 L. Ed. 60 (1803).

In 1787 Blair served as a delegate to the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia. Soon
afterward he was appointed to the Virginia
Court of Appeals. Blair received his greatest
judicial honor when President Washington
nominated him, along with five other men, to
the first High Court on September 24, 1789. (At
the time, only six justices sat on the Supreme
Court. By 1869 the number had risen to nine.)
Blair was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September
26, 1789.

As an associate justice, Blair took part in
CHISHOLM V. GEORGIA, 2 U.S. 419, 1 L. Ed. 440
(1793), the Supreme Court’s first major opinion.
The issue before the Court was state sovereignty
and whether a citizen of one state could sue another state in federal court over a disputed
claim. The Supreme Court ruled that under
Article III, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution, a
citizen of one state could indeed sue another
state in federal court.

Many states decried the outcome of
Chisholm, fearing lawsuits that would lead to
economic disaster. Four years after the decision
was handed down, Congress ratified the
ELEVENTH AMENDMENT to the U.S. Constitution,
which prohibited citizens of one state from
suing another state without the consent of the
defendant state. The amendment in effect overturned
Chisholm.

Until the 1860s, U.S. Supreme Court justices
sat on a circuit court as well as the High Court.
In Hayburn’s Case, 2 U.S. 408, 1 L. Ed. 436
(1792), Blair broke new ground as a federal
appeals judge by ruling that a congressional act
ordering circuit judges to serve as PENSION
commissioners was unconstitutional. Blair
noted that the supervision of a federal pension
plan was not a judicial duty. He ruled that the
designation of circuit judges as administrators
violated the SEPARATION-OF-POWERS doctrine.
Blair retired from the High Court on January
27, 1796, citing the stress of serving on both
the Supreme Court and the circuit court, which
in Blair’s case stretched from New Jersey to Virginia.
He died in his native Williamsburg at age
sixty-eight, in 1800.

FURTHER READINGS
Congressional Quarterly. 1989. Guide to the U.S. Supreme
Court. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly.
Cushman, Claire, ed. 1993. The Supreme Court Justices: Illustrated
Biographies, 1789–1993. Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Quarterly.