When the North Carolina Supreme Court was established in 1819, John Louis Taylor became its first chief justice, a post that he would hold until his death in 1829. During his time on the court, he would profoundly shape American law and establish the North Carolina Supreme Court as a source of new legal ideas. He wrote landmark opinions defending property rights, creating the modern doctrine of standing, and strengthening personal privacy by distinguishing public and private conduct.
John Louis Taylor was born in 1769 in London to an Irish family. Shortly afterwards, both of his parents died. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Taylor came to colonial Virginia with his older brother, James. James enrolled John at the College of William and Mary, where he received a classical education and most likely studied under the brilliant natural law scholar George Wythe.
Due to financial difficulties, Taylor was forced to leave William and Mary before graduation. He moved to North Carolina and finished his legal studies privately, passing the bar in 1788 and setting up a practice in Fayetteville. Throughout his legal career, Taylor continued the Great Books education that he had started at William and Mary, assembling a vast library of classical legal sources that he would later use to open North Carolina’s first law school.
A brilliant orator and writer, he became involved in politics, quickly rising through the ranks of government. In 1798, the legislature made him a superior court judge, and because a uniform state supreme court did not yet exist, he was often assigned to loosely assembled appellate panels to review cases from the trial courts. In 1810, his fellow appellate judges made him their chief judge.
Taylor’s views on the law were highly complex, but there were a few principles he always adhered to:
Originalism. Taylor believed that the U. S. Constitution’s meaning was fixed at the time it was written. In Jones v. Crittenden (1814), he ruled that a North Carolina law preventing the execution of debts violated the Contracts Clause of the Constitution. He emphasized that the Constitution must be interpreted according to “the plain and natural import of [its] words” and the “design” of its Framers rather than judges’ subjective opinions.
Natural Law. Today, it is common for legal scholars to pit originalism against natural law. Natural law is the belief that there is a universal moral code which binds all human beings, and that while man-made laws are important, they are subordinate to this code. Taylor, on the contrary, believed that these two theories−original meaning and natural law−could go hand in hand. First and foremost, he maintained that there were certain ethical principles which were always binding on a society regardless of the will of a majority. In State v. Boon (1801), he declared that murder is always a crime under the natural law, even if the written law does not say so. Taylor thought that the written law was simply an adaptation to concrete circumstances of the unwritten law of nature (which he viewed as being very abstract and broad, with rules as simple as do “what is right”). As a result, knowledge of natural law principles was essential to understanding what the Framers meant in particular constitutional provisions.
In Taylor’s words, the Constitution was not simply an act of arbitrary will, but an attempt to “give aproper direction to . . . general [moral] principles” (from Jones v. Crittenden [1814]). Thus, in his view, courts must “presume[ ] that [written laws] are founded on the law of nature, or contain nothing repugnant to it” (Hargrave v. Dusenberry, 1823).
Roman Law. It was not until the early twentieth century that Roman texts were driven out of our nation’s law schools, and Taylor was one of this field’s greatest scholars. Most Roman law is contained in a few books by law professors who worked for the emperors; under Justinian these treatises were edited and compiled into one massive legal encyclopedia called the Digest. Unlike modern law, which is based on precedent, Roman law was “deduced from pure sources of genuine philosophy” (Hargrave v. Dusenberry, 1823). As a result, it was a helpful resource for judges who were trying to determine the natural law’s meaning. In Hargrave v. Dusenberry (1823), Taylor used this resource to resolve a real-world case.
The question was whether a man who unknowingly used a counterfeit note in a purchase was required to refund the seller. North Carolina law was silent on the subject, so the chief justice turned to “general grounds of rational jurisprudence” and “fundamental principles of right and wrong.” As his guide, he used the Roman civil law, which held that a refund was always required for counterfeit, lest a seller be forced to accept something “different from what is due as a payment.”
In North Carolina’s early history, our legal system was uncertain. Many of our state’s leaders did not want to wholly adopt English law, but what was to replace it? John Louis Taylor filled that gap. He brought together insights from natural law, Roman law, and the English common law to create a unique legal worldview that has guided his beloved Court ever since.
Chief Justice Taylor was more than a judge. He was our state’s John Marshall. Like Chief Justice John Marshall of the nation’s Supreme Court, he came to a court that was new and unsure of its role and left it a confident, highly respected legal authority. In the future, North Carolina’s Supreme Court would go on to play a key role in shaping American election law, free speech law, and broader natural law theory. These remarkable achievements can all, in one way or another, be traced back to Taylor, the orphan from London who built the North Carolina Supreme Court.