John Blair Jr.

Blair came from one of Virginia's most prominent political families and developed a career almost entirely within the law and judiciary. Unlike Wilson and Jay, he was not primarily a national political theorist; his importance came from his long experience as a state judge and his participation in the formation of both Virginia's and the United States' constitutional governments. His judicial writings are particularly useful for studying the early development of constitutional review and textual interpretation.

Blair was born in Williamsburg in 1732, the son of John Blair, a prominent colonial official who served on Virginia's Governor's Council and repeatedly acted as governor. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1754 and then studied law at London's Middle Temple. He returned to Virginia, was admitted to the bar, and began practicing law in Williamsburg.

Blair entered the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1766 and participated in colonial resistance to Parliament's taxation policies. During the Revolution he served in the Virginia Convention of 1776 and on the committee responsible for preparing the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Constitution. He subsequently served on Virginia's Council of State, the General Court, the High Court of Chancery, and the Virginia Court of Appeals. In Commonwealth v. Caton (1782), Blair was associated with one of the earliest American judicial discussions of the authority of courts to reject unconstitutional legislative acts, although the surviving evidence leaves some uncertainty about the precise extent of his concurrence.

Washington nominated Blair to the Supreme Court in September 1789, and he became one of its original Associate Justices. His most important Supreme Court opinion came in Chisholm v. Georgia, where he joined the majority and wrote a separate opinion based almost entirely upon the Constitution itself. Blair explicitly avoided the extensive historical and philosophical arguments found in the opinions of Jay and Wilson and treated the constitutional text as the principal source of the Court's authority. He also participated in Georgia v. Brailsford, Hayburn's Case, Glass v. Sloop Betsey, and other cases of the Jay Court.

Blair resigned from the Supreme Court in 1795 because of poor health and the burdens associated with the federal judiciary's system of circuit riding. He returned to Williamsburg and largely withdrew from public life. He died there on August 31, 1800, and was buried at Bruton Parish Church.

Blair's legacy rests particularly on his contribution to early American judicial review and constitutional interpretation. His career demonstrates that the idea of courts enforcing constitutional limitations did not originate solely with the federal Supreme Court in Marbury v. Madison; state courts had already confronted the issue during the 1780s. His Chisholm opinion also provides one of the clearest examples of a founding-era justice reasoning directly from constitutional text rather than from broad political philosophy.

Constitutional approach: Strong textual/original constitutionalist. Blair is probably the clearest of this first group to fit your “strict constitutionalist” category. His Chisholm opinion explicitly treated the Constitution as the governing source and rejected the need to consult European constitutional arrangements or broader historical theories.

Key decisions and opinions:

In Chisholm, Blair joined Jay, Wilson, and Cushing in the majority, and all four wrote separately. In Georgia v. Brailsford, Blair also issued individual reasoning rather than simply joining a modern-style majority opinion.