DAY, WILLIAM RUFUS

DAY, WILLIAM RUFUS

William Rufus Day served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1903 to 1922. Day served on a Court dominated by Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR. , yet Day played a key role during a period when the federal government began to extend its police and regulatory powers.

Day was born April 17, 1849, in Ravenna,
Ohio. He graduated from the University of
Michigan in 1870 and attended its law school for
one year. He was admitted to the Ohio bar in
1872 and entered practice in Canton, Ohio.

Ohio was a hotbed of REPUBLICAN PARTY
politics in the late nineteenth century. Day
became active in the party and,more important,
became a trusted friend and adviser to WILLIAM
MCKINLEY, who was elected president in 1896.
McKinley appointed Day SECRETARY OF STATE
in April 1898. Five months later Day was chosen
to head the U.S. Peace Commission to negotiate
an end to the SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR with
Spain. He left his cabinet post to fulfill this duty.

McKinley rewarded Day for his friendship,
political counsel, and service as secretary of state
with an appointment in 1899 to the U.S. Sixth
Circuit Court of Appeals. With McKinley’s
assassination in 1901, Vice President THEODORE
ROOSEVELT assumed the presidency. In 1903
Roosevelt appointed Day to the Supreme Court,
in part because Roosevelt needed to strengthen
his ties with Ohio Republicans.

Day held a centrist position on the Supreme
Court.More liberal justices such as Holmes and
LOUIS D. BRANDEIS sought to allow more active
government involvement in the national econ-
omy. Conservative justices continued to restrict
government regulation of business and the
growth of federal power. Day took a middle
course, though some commentators believe he
tilted more to supporting STATES’ RIGHTS.

His most famous opinion, HAMMER V.
DAGENHART, 247 U.S. 251, 38 S. Ct. 529, 62 L.
Ed. 1101 (1918), illustrates his more conserva-
tive tendencies. In the early 1900s, Congress
sought to regulate the use of child labor, passing
a child labor act in 1916 (39 Stat. 675, c. 432, for-
mally known as the Keating-Owen Act). The act
prohibited the movement in interstate com-
merce of goods that were made by children. In
Hammer, a manufacturer was charged with vio-
lating the act. Under the Constitution’s COM-
MERCE CLAUSE, Congress has the right to
regulate interstate commerce. Day gave the
clause a restrictive reading, ruling that com-
merce did not include manufactured goods that
were themselves harmless. In addition, he said,
Congress had intruded into an area of regula-
tion that was reserved to the states. To allow
Congress to regulate industry would destroy
FEDERALISM and the system of government set
out in the Constitution.
Despite this hostility to the Child Labor Act,
Day upheld the federal government’s power to
regulate interstate commerce in other cases that involved the shipment of impure food, drugs, and liquor. He was also supportive of federal
antitrust prosecutions that involved restraint of
trade.

However, Day’s opposition to federal regulation
of the workplace did not carry over to state
regulation of industry. This is revealed in his dissent
in LOCHNER V. NEW YORK, 198 U.S. 45, 25 S.
Ct. 539, 49 L. Ed. 937 (1905). In Lochner the
Court, on a 5–4 vote, struck down a New York
state law that specified a maximum sixty-hour
week for bakery employees. The Court ruled
that the law was a “meddlesome interference”
with business, concluding that the regulation of
work hours was an unjustified infringement on
“the right to labor, and with the right of free
contract on the part of the individual, either as
employer or employee.” Although Holmes’s dissent
has received more attention, Day’s made
clear that the state had the right to promote
public welfare, even if it came in conflict with
the concept of liberty of contract.

Finally, Day authored the opinion in Weeks v.
United States, 232 U.S. 383, 34 S. Ct. 341, 58 L.
Ed. 652 (1914), which established the federal
EXCLUSIONARY RULE for criminal evidence
seized in violation of the FOURTH AMENDMENT.
Day’s opinion suggested that exclusion of
tainted evidence was implicit in the requirement
of the Fourth Amendment. If illegally seized evidence
could be admitted in a criminal trial, he
said, “the protection of the 4th Amendment . . .
is of no value . . . and might as well be stricken
from the Constitution.”

Day retired from the Court in 1922. He died on Mackinac Island, Michigan, on July 9, 1923.

CROSS-REFERENCES
Child Labor Laws; Labor Law.