This entry from Encyclopedia Britannica features Samuel Freeman Miller, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1862-90), a leading opponent of efforts to use the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to protect business against government regulation. He was spokesman for the court in its first attempt to construe the amendment, passed after the American Civil War largely to assure the rights of the newly freed slaves. He was in the majority then, but his view that the amendment did not bar legislative restraints on industry ceased to prevail by the 1890s and did not again predominate until the late 1930s.