Charles Henry Butler

BUTLER, CHARLES HENRY

Charles Henry Butler served as the Supreme
Court reporter of decisions from 1902 to 1916.
Butler was born June 18, 1859, in New York
City. He was the son of William Allen Butler, a
lawyer, and the grandson of BENJAMIN F. BUTLER,
U.S. attorney general during the administration
of MARTIN VAN BUREN. Butler attended Princeton University but left school before graduating.
He then studied law in his father’s New
York office for several years, and often accompanied
his father to Washington, D.C., when the
elder Butler appeared before the U.S. Supreme
Court to argue cases. Butler was admitted to the
New York state bar in 1882 and subsequently
practiced law in New York City. In 1898, he
served as the legal expert for the Fairbanks-
Herschell Commission, which was convened to
adjust the boundary of Alaska and Canada.
In December 1902, Butler left the PRACTICE
OF LAW to accept an appointment as reporter of
decisions for the U.S. Supreme Court, a position
created by Congress in 1816. In the early days of
the Court, the reporter had been primarily
responsible for editing, publishing, and distributing
the Court’s opinions; beginning in 1874,
however, Congress provided money for the government
to publish the Court’s opinions, and
thus by the time Butler became reporter, his role
was limited to editorial tasks.
While reporter, Butler edited and published
volumes 187 to 241 of the United States Reports,
the official publication of the opinions of the
U.S. Supreme Court. During his tenure with the
Court, he also was a delegate to the Hague Peace
Conference in 1907. He later authored A Century
at the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United
States (1942), a sometimes lighthearted account
of the Court’s inner workings and his experiences
as reporter. In the book, published two
years after his death, Butler described his dealings
with the justices as “delightful and congenial.”
He wrote that the work was “very
interesting. It was not difficult and did not take
all of my time. The salary . . . afforded me a comfortable
income.” Butler also described in some
detail the various rules and customs of the
Court, including the writ of certiorari and the
social etiquette of the Court, and shared anecdotes
about lawyers who had argued before the
Court. With respect to the reporter’s position,
Butler discussed the process of preparing headnotes,
the paragraphs that appear at the beginning
of opinions to summarize the major points
of law contained in the opinions. During Butler’s
tenure, the Court made clear that headnotes
were not to be construed as part of the opinions
and were instead only the expressions of the
reporter about the holdings of the Court.
Butler eventually found his position to be
“somewhat monotonous” and noted that
“[t]here was nothing constructive about it so far
as my part was concerned.” In addition, Butler
was frustrated by the anonymity of the post and
by frequent misunderstandings about his role
and duties; he wrote that he was once introduced
as the “Head Stenographer of the United
States Supreme Court.” As a result, Butler
resigned from the Court in October 1916, to
return to private practice in Washington, D.C.
He also wrote extensively about INTERNATIONAL
LAW, including several works on U.S. relations
with Spain and Cuba.He died in 1940, at the age
of eighty-one.

FURTHER READINGS
Butler, Charles Henry. 1942. A Century at the Bar of the
Supreme Court of the United States. New York: Van Rees
Press.
Congressional Quarterly. 1989. Guide to the U.S. Supreme
Court. 2d ed. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly.

CROSS-REFERENCES
Law Reports.