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Although he wrote hundreds of opinions in the nearly thirty years (1862–1890) he served on the United States Supreme Court, Samuel Freeman Miller is most famous as the author of the Court's opinion in the Slaughter-house Cases (1873). Writing for a narrow majority, Miller upheld a Louisiana law regulating slaughtering houses and denied that the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment provided any protection for the white butchers who had challenged it. Miller rested his ruling on what he asserted was the clear purpose of the Reconstruction era amendments, to protect

the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him. (Slaughter-house Cases, 83 U.S. 36, 71 [1873])

Scholars have challenged Miller's narrow reading of the amendments; the relevant debates, legal and historical, are traced out in Pamela Brandwein, Reconstructing Reconstruction (1999). In this study, Michael A. Ross examines Miller's decision in that and other cases with an eye to tracing the relation between his constitutional ideas and his increasing dissatisfaction with the nation's political economy. The result is an interesting perspective on changes in Republican ideology over the second half of the nineteenth century but a less effective explanation of the relationship between Miller's viewpoint and his rulings. Indeed, as Ross notes, while Miller “often criticized his party's new leadership and policies, some of his judicial opinions eventually aided the very forces he opposed” (p. 245). Just as Ross does not explain why Miller was oblivious to the consequences of his decisions, he does not fully examine why Miller, who gave speeches on a variety of issues while on the bench, chose not to use the Court as a bully pulpit. Miller dissented eloquently in his early years (p. 224), but after the mid-1870s he seemed unwilling to author powerful dissents, even when he felt strongly. Although he gave a speech in 1888 arguing that anarchists and their followers should be viewed as victims of the economy and their time, Miller did not dissent from the Court's decision upholding the Haymarket defendants' conviction (pp. 242–43). The contrast between Miller and his colleague John Marshall Harlan, whose impassioned dissents gave voice to the mute, is notable. This book would have been stronger if Ross had done more to tease out why the otherwise outspoken Miller remained so silent as he watched the Court majority shatter his dreams.

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