John Marshall Harlan

John Marshall Harlan was an American lawyer and politician who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1877 until his death in 1911. He is often called the Great Dissenter due to his many dissents in cases that restricted civil liberties, including Plessy v. Ferguson, and was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which permitted state and private actors to engage in racial segregation. He also dissented in Lochner v. New York (1905), which invalidated a state law setting maximum working hours on the basis of substantive due process.