LAMAR, JOSEPH R(UCKER)

born Oct. 14, 1857, Elbert county, Ga., U.S. died Jan. 2, 1916, Washington, D.C. associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (191116). Admitted to the bar in 1878, Lamar taught Latin for a year at Bethany College in Georgia and married the daughter of the college president. In 1880 he started his practice in the capital city of Augusta. He rose rapidly at the bar, while also serving two terms in the state legislature and writing on the history of Georgia jurisprudence. In 1893 he was appointed one of three commissioners to recodify the laws of Georgia. The compilation, The Code of the State of Georgia (1896), was well received and contributed to his later appointment to the state Supreme Court in 1904. He served briefly, stepping down owing to ill health, but in 1911 he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President William Howard Taft. He gave the court's opinion on two important cases: Gompers v. Bucks Stove and Range Company (1911), which upheld the power of the courts to punish violations of injunctions but set aside the convictions of Samuel Gompers and other labour leaders on procedural grounds, and United States v. Midwest Oil Company (1914), which upheld the president's right to withhold public oil lands from private entry. Lamar represented President Woodrow Wilson at a conference called in 1914 to settle differences between Mexico and the United States arising out of Wilson's refusal to recognize President Victoriano Huerta of Mexico.