JOSEPH HODGES CHOATE
The Income tax had been ruled Constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1881, but the then “new” Court—the one that would render the Plessy v. Furgeson decision—was a more conservative one. By a 5-4 partisan decision, the Supreme Court reversed itself and killed the income tax until a Constitutional amendment could be passed 19 years later in 1913.
Joseph Hodges Choate was an American lawyer and diplomat. Choate was associated with many of the most famous litigations in American legal history, including the Kansas prohibition cases, the Chinese exclusion cases, the Isaac H. Maynard election returns case, the Income Tax Suit, and the Samuel J. Tilden, Jane Stanford, and Alexander Turney Stewart will cases. In the public sphere, he was influential in the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
