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B. August 3, 1824 – D. May 14, 1887 It Is the Tradition of Western Michigan

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B. August 3, 1824 – D. May 14, 1887 It Is the Tradition of Western Michigan WOODS CLASS IN MEMORIAM – JUSTICE WILLIAM BURNHAM WOODS UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT JUSTICE b. August 3, 1824 – d. May 14, 1887 It is the tradition of Western Michigan University’s Thomas M. Cooley Law School to name each entering class after a former justice of the Michigan Supreme Court or of the United States’ Supreme Court. Today’s entering class is named in honor of United States Supreme Court Justice William Burnham Woods. William Burnham Woods was born in Newark, Ohio, on August 3, 1824. His father, Ezekiel Woods, was a farmer-merchant from Kentucky. His mother, Sarah Burnham Woods, was from New England. Woods attended Western Reserve College and Yale, where he graduated valedictorian in 1845. He studied law with S.D. King in his hometown of Newark and became his partner after passing the Ohio bar in 1847. After nearly a decade of practice in Newark, where he rose to local prominence as a lawyer, Woods married Anne E. Warner in 1855, and was elected mayor of Newark the following year. His political experience as mayor was followed by an election on the Democratic ticket to the state legislature in 1857, where he was chosen Speaker of the House. When the Republicans gained control of the state House in 1860, Woods became the minority leader. Although opposed to the Civil War and President Lincoln’s policy, Woods was convinced that victory over the South was necessary. He joined the Union Army in 1862, and saw action at Shiloh, Vicksburg, and on General Sherman’s march through Georgia. Near the end of the war, he was promoted to the rank of brevet major general in 1866. After the war, Woods moved to Alabama where he planted cotton and resumed his law practice. Now a Republican, Woods was elected to the Middle Chancery Court of Alabama in 1868. A year later, he was appointed circuit court judge for the Fifth Circuit when President Grant and the newly established national Republican Party came to power in 1869. Woods would spend the next 11 years traveling across Fifth Circuit states to master their laws and gaining the respect of his southern colleagues. In 1880, Woods was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Rutherford B. Hayes to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of Justice William Strong. The Senate confirmed his appointment on December 21, 1880. As an associate justice, Woods wrote 159 opinions and rarely dissented. In his six and a half years on the Court, two cases highlighted his career. Woods wrote the majority’s decision in United States v. Harris (1883), striking down the Ku Klux Klan act of 1871, a federal statute to protect the civil rights of African Americans. Woods’s opinion concluded that the states, not the federal government, would have to end Klan violence. In Presser v. State of Illinois (1886), a Second Amendment case, Woods wrote for a unanimous Court, supporting the right of state governments to maintain militias and to decide if individuals can carry arms. Justice Wood’s tenure on the court was brief. He was partially incapacitated by illness in the spring of 1886, and died a year later, on May 14, 1887, in Washington, DC. .
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