HUGHES, CHARLES EVANS

Jurist and statesman Charles Evans Hughes (April 11, 1862–August 27, 1948) was born in Glen Falls, New York, the only child of David Charles Hughes, an evangelical minister, and Mary Catherine Connelly, a schoolteacher. His father's calling carried the family to a number of New York and New Jersey communities during Charles's youth. A precocious child, he studied at home until age nine, attended three years of public school in Newark and another year in Manhattan before entering college at Colgate (then Madison University). After two years at Colgate, he transferred to Brown University, finishing third in his class.

After graduating first in his Columbia law class, Hughes passed the New York bar with a record high score and joined a New York firm in 1884. He became a partner three years later and married the daughter of the firm's senior partner the next year. Overcome by work and poor health, he left private practice briefly for a teaching position at Cornell Law School, but he soon returned to the firm, becoming a prominent figure in commercial law.

Hughes would also become active in public service and politics. As counsel to committees of the New York legislature, he led inquiries into corruption and mismanagement of the state's gas, electric, and insurance industries. A reluctant but winning candidate for governor on the Republican ticket in 1906 and 1908, he pushed successfully for creation of two utility regulatory commissions and the first significant workman's compensation program in the nation.

Although Theodore Roosevelt had backed Hughes in his two gubernatorial races, the future justice's distaste for the give and take of politics caused strains in their relationship. In 1910, however, President William Howard Taft appointed Hughes to a seat on the United States Supreme Court, where he served with distinction until resigning in 1916 to make a losing bid for the White House against President Woodrow Wilson. Following the election, he returned to private practice in New York, then served as secretary of state in the Warren Harding administration.

In 1930, President Herbert Hoover brought Hughes back to the Supreme Court, this time as chief justice. Hughes held the Court's center seat during one of the most tumultuous periods in its–and the nation's–history. Although never as committed to the laissez faire philosophy of the Court's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," which critics had dubbed the most conservative justices of the period, Hughes wrote or joined a number of decisions rejecting New Deal programs and state legislation designed to pull the country out of the depths of the Depression. He spoke for the Court, for example, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), invalidating provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). But he also authored Home Building & Loan v. Blaisdell (1934), substantially narrowing the scope of the contract clause as a restriction on state power. And when the Court began dismantling its laissez faire precedents during the 1937 court-packing episode, Hughes wrote the first two opinions signaling an end to that era: West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), upholding a state minimum wage law for women virtually identical to one the Court had struck down the previous year; and National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin (1937), upholding federal regulation of labor-management relations. Chief Justice Hughes retired from the Court in 1941 and died at age eight-six in 1948.

HUGHES, CHARLES EVANS

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