Willis Van Devanter: Chancellor of the Taft Court ROBERT POST Although William H. Taft was president for only four years, he appointed a remark able five justices to the Supreme Court.1 But only two of these appointments remained on the Court when Taft became chief justiceMahlon Pitney and Willis Van Devanter. Pit ney would be gone within eighteen months, but Van Devanter would remain as “one of the most enduring achievements of the Taft Administration, and very possibly its greatest.”2 Early Life Willis Van Devanter was born on April 17, 1859, in Marion, Indiana. He was about eighteen months younger than Taft. Van Devanter’s father was a successful local lawyer. Although Van Devanter wanted to go into farming, his father prevailed upon him to attend Indiana Asbury University (now DePauw University) and then Cincinnati Law School, where Van Devanter was a year behind but nevertheless acquainted with Taft himself.3 Unlike both Taft and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who followed well-worn career paths, Van Devanter elected to move as a young man to the distant and lawless West. In 1884, within a week of President Chester A. Arthur’s appointment of Van Devanter’s brother-in-law (John W. Lacey) as Chief Justice of the Territorial Court for Wyoming Territory, Van Devanter relocated to the frontier town of Cheyenne. In 1885, he offered his services to the new territorial governor, the loyal, shrewd, and astute Fran cis E. Warren, stalwart Republican, wealthy rancher, and Civil War recipient of the Medal of Honor. Van Devanter’s rise in the new territory was “little short of sensational.”4 He became a commissioner tasked with revising the laws and statutes of Wyoming Territory in 1886;5 the city attorney of Cheyenne in 1887;6 a member of the Territorial House of Repre sentatives in 1888;7 and, in 1889, at the age of thirty, the Chief Justice of the Territorial Supreme Court.8 When Wyoming became a state 1890, Van Devanter was elected to its new Supreme Court and became its first Chief Justice.9 Advising a friend to try his luck in the western territories, Van Devanter 288 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY At age 25, Willis Van Devanter moved from Indiana to Cheyenne, WY (pictured in 1890) and became a successful lawyer representing the Union Pacific Railroad and large cattle ranchers. He also became active in the Wyoming Republican Party. wrote, “A man grows fourfold more than he would under other conditions.”10 Within four days of his election as Chief Justice, Van Devanter suddenly and unexpectedly resigned,11 returning to the suc cessful law practice that he had maintained throughout his time in Wyoming. He traveled the state in stagecoaches and on horseback. In 1890 he formed with his brother-in-law the firm of Lacey and Van Devanter. It quickly became “Wyoming’s most prominent law firm,”12 representing the most important economic interests in the state, including cattlemen’s associations and the state’s most significant railroad, the Union Pacific. Most memorably, Van Devanter defended the cat tlemen who, along with a contingent ofTexas gunman, had traveled to the northern reaches of the state to exterminate the “rustlers” who they claimed were stealing cattle.13 After murdering two suspected rustlers, the excur sion was itself surrounded by angry residents and survived only after extraction by federal troops. The invasion was the outgrowth of ongoing disputes between southern Republi can cattle interests and northern settlers. Van Devanter conducted a masterful and effective defense of the gunmen in what later became known as the Johnson County War.14 From the moment he arrived in the territory, Van Devanter sought to become an important player in Wyoming Republican politics. Largely because ofhis close connec tion to Warren, he “served as Chairman of the Republican State Committee from 1892 to 1895, as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in St. Louis in 1896, and as a member of the Republican National Committee from 1896 to 1900.”15 After Warren became a powerful United States Senator,16 Van Devanter became “Senator Warren’s man in Wyoming, his confidant, counsel, and political manager.”17 Van De vanter subsidized Republican newspapers...