February 28, 1807 – Thomas Todd Nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court

Thomas Todd, born in 1765, was an American attorney who became an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Raised in the Colony of Virginia, he studied law and later participated in the founding of Kentucky, where he served as a clerk, judge, and justice.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thomas Todd

As Joel Richard Paul writes in Without Precedent: John Marshall and His Times, p. 298:

Though Jefferson opposed expanding the size of the federal judiciary when [John] Adams did it, he relished the opportunity to name a third justice and persuaded Congress to add a seventh justice to the Supreme Court. In 1807, he named Thomas Todd, forty-two, another reliable Republican, who was chief justice of the highest court in Kentucky. Justice Todd, like [John] Marshall, grew up on the Virginia frontier, and he, too, [like the other Jefferson appointees] was quickly seduced by Marshall’s genial manner. In two decades on the court, Todd dissented only once from the chief justice.”

Frank H. Easterbrook, when he was Professor of Law at the University of Chicago in 1983 (he later was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit), in his article “The Most Insignificant Justice: Further Evidence,” 50 University of Chicago Law Review 481 (1983), claimed that Thomas Todd was the most insignificant justice ever to serve on the Supreme Court as of that date. His argument, albeit written tongue-in-cheek, is backed up by quite a bit of data.