MR. JUSTICE WILLIAM JOHNSON, CREATIVE DISSENTER

Until the advent of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the masterful and magnetic figure of Chief Justice John Marshall well-nigh overshadowed the whole field of constitutional jurisprudence. That Marshall made inestimable additions to our ideas of cooperative living at the very beginning of our democracy, and that his repute was well deserved, cannot be gainsaid. But one has good cause to wonder why the name of so distinguished a colleague as William Johnson, who sat on the same bench with Marshal for almost thirty years during that formative period, should have been almost completely obscured all these years. Rare, indeed, is the jurist or lawyer who has heard of him, yet he was a man who was outstanding in his day for disagreeing with Marshall on his most important pronouncements and, at times, exceeding Marshall in his Federalist views.