Births on March 5

Robert Cooper Grier, American lawyer and jurist (d. 1870)

Robert Cooper Grier (March 5, 1794 – September 25, 1870), was an American jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States. A Jacksonian Democrat from Pennsylvania who served from 1846 to 1870, Grier weighed in on some of the most important cases of the 19th century. As one of two Northern members of the majority in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Grier concurred that African Americans were not and were never meant to be citizens of the United States and that the property rights of slaveholders were clearly protected in the US Constitution. However, Grier wrote the majority opinion in the 1863 Prize Cases, upholding Abraham Lincoln's presidential power to institute Union blockades of Confederate ports and giving the Union Army a strategic advantage in the American Civil War.