I'm going to go against the grain here and say FF, because Fillmore made one appointment to the Supreme Court -- Benjamin Curtis, who was easily one of the greatest of the Justices in the Nineteenth Century.
Curtis's tenure on the Court was short -- only six years -- and his reason for resigning from the Court when he was still only 47 years old has been disputed by scholars, with some saying that he resigned for practical reasons -- money; disliking the obligation to "ride the circuits" -- while other scholars say that Curtis resigned because he was disgusted with his colleagues who made up the majority in the
Dred Scott decision.
Prof. David P. Currie of the University of Chicago Law School (a former colleague of Barack Obama's) praised Curtis's dissenting opinion in the case of
Dred Scott as the single greatest opinion written by any Justice during the first 100 years of the Court's existence. Currie describes Curtis's dissent in
Dred Scott as "one of the great masterpieces of constitutional opinion-writing, in which, calmly and painstakingly, he dismantled virtually every argument of his variegated adversaries" in the Court's majority opinions. Curtis's dissent was "one of the best examples of legal craftsmanship to be found anywhere in the United States Reports," and "the supreme monument of the lawyer's craft in the first century of constitutional adjudication." (David P. Currie, "The Constitution in the Supreme Court: the First Hundred Years, 1789-1888," pages 273, 279, and 454.)
Curtis did not just say that the
Dred Scott majority Justices were
legally wrong, but that those Justices made their decision based on their
political opinions as well.
To allow this to be done with the Constitution, upon reasons purely political, renders its judicial interpretation impossible -- because judicial tribunals, as such, cannot decide upon political considerations. ...
Political reasons have not the requisite certainty to afford rules of juridical interpretation. They are different in different men. They are different in the same men at different times. And when a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought to mean.
Millard Fillmore, by appointing Curtis to the Supreme Court, contributed something great to America's legal landscape.
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