Willis Van Devanter

associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

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Willis Van Devanter (born April 17, 1859, Marion, Ind., U.S.—died Feb. 8, 1941, Washington, D.C.) was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (1910–37).

After graduating from Cincinnati Law School in 1881, he initially worked for his father’s law firm; but in 1884, he moved to Cheyenne, Wyo., to become a railroad attorney. There he became involved in territorial politics, serving on a commission to codify the Wyoming statutes in 1886, as city attorney for Cheyenne, and in the territorial legislature. After two years as chief justice of the territorial Supreme Court, he returned to private practice when Wyoming became a state in 1890. He remained heavily involved in Republican politics.

In 1897 he became an assistant U.S. attorney general, and in 1903 Pres. Theodore Roosevelt named him circuit judge for the eighth circuit. Seven years later, Pres. William Howard Taft appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Van Devanter specialized in the fields in which he had worked in the West: public land, water rights, Indian questions, and admiralty and corporation law. Highly conservative on economic issues, he stayed on after his intended retirement date to become the backbone of the anti-New Deal bloc.