The Judicial and Ancient Game: James Wilson, John Marshall Harlan, and the Beginnings of Golf at the Supreme Court ROSS E. DAVIES^ Golf has a long history at the Supreme Court simply as an entertaining pastime for some of its members. Yet the Justices’ interest in the sport can also be viewed as a reflection of the evolving work and culture of the institution and of the nation it serves. This article revisits a few early developments involving the first golfer on the Court (Justice James Wilson), the first golf enthusiast (the first Justice John Marshall Harlan), and the first golfing majority (October Term 1906). Wilson in Scotland The earliest visible connection between the Supreme Court and golfpredates the Court. In the summer of 1765, James Wilson was in Ed inburgh, Scotland, studying bookkeeping and merchant accounting. According to Wilson bi ographer Charles Page Smith, “[t]he drudgery of accounting turned out to be no more con genial than the drudgery of tutoring [Wilson had recently given up teaching], and his brief experience with ledgers and accounts merely hardened Wilson’s resolve to go to America.”1 Wilson would indeed emigrate the next year and, aftera distinguishedcareerinprivateprac tice and public service, serve on the Supreme Court from 1790 until his death in 1798. But before he left Scotland in 1766, he played at least one round of golf. Writing to Wilson in 1785, his accounting instructor recalled the event: Upon recollection you will remem ber, that on June 13th, 1765, you did me the honour to begin the writ ing [of] a Course ofBookkeeping.... I have often reflected with regret, that our acquaintance had no sooner commenced, thanitwas interrupted, by your going abroad.... You will THE JUDICIAL AND ANCIENT GAME 123 perhaps recollect, that during your stay here, I one day pressed and pre vailed with you, to take a game at golf with me on Brun[t]sfield links,2 a di version you was totally unacquainted with, my proposal was to instruct you in it, but how sadly was I mortify’d at your beating me every round; this I thought often since, had something prophetic in it; & may it always hap pen to you, and your opponents in all your laudable undertakings.3 Wilson does not seem to have kept up with the game in the New World. There are glimpses to be had of golf in America from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nine teenth, scattered from New York to the District ofColumbia to South Carolina to Georgia. But there is not enough evidence to say with confi dence that the game was actually being played anywhere in particular at any particular time, or perhaps even at all. Thus, although Wilson’s work on the Court and on circuit took him to or through all those places,4 it may well be that he never encountered someone with whom to play.5 The consensus among golfscholars is that ifanyone was playing golf in the early Repub lic, they gave itup sometime inthe early 1800s, and no one took up the game again for a long time. In his authoritative A History of Golf, Robert Browning offers a compact and repre sentative summary of this stage of golf in the United States: A reference to golf in Georgia ap pears as late as 1818, but the dec laration of war by the United States against Great Britain in 1812 may have had something to do with the fading out of the popularity of the game. For the next seventy years or so golf in the United States would appear to have fallen into desuetude, and it is not until the early eighties that we find the game beginning to attract attention again.6 And so it should come as no surprise that there is nothing to be seen ofmembers of the Court playing the game during that period. The Return of Golf During the American golfrenaissance (or per haps nascence) in the late nineteenth century,7 golf reconnected with the bar in general8 and the Supreme Court in particular. The first recorded reconnection with the Court was a remotely familial one involving Beatrix Hoyt, a granddaughter...