Rare Autograph Auction Featuring Edison's Patent
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 5/14/2020
ANS from the Associate Justice on this 8x3¾ page " Mass Historical Society's Collections Vol 8 3rd (Series) Please deliver to the Bearer for Horace Gray Jr. April 5/54" on reverse he writes "To the Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum"
Horace Gray (1828-1902) graduated from Harvard at age 17, and later became the youngest ever member of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (at age 36 in 1864). In 1873, he became Chief Justice of that state court. President Arthur appointed him in 1882 to the US Supreme Court, where he served as Associate Justice until his death. One of the few Supreme Court appointees of the era who had not been a politician, Gray prided himself on separating law from politics. Gray sided with the majority in Plessy v Ferguson (1896), upholding racial segregation, but wrote the opinion in US v Wong Kim Ark (1898) that children of non-citizens, if born in the US, were US citizens. Gray was the first to employ a law clerk, both at the state and federal level. His clerk in the Massachusetts SJC was future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.fine condition.
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