births
November 4, 1809
Benjamin Robbins Curtis, American lawyer and jurist (died 1874)
Benjamin Robbins Curtis
Benjamin Robbins Curtis was an American lawyer and judge who served as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1851 to 1857. Curtis was the only Whig justice of the Supreme Court, and he was the first Supreme Court justice to have a formal law degree. He is often remembered as one of the two dissenters in the Supreme Court's infamous 1857 decision Dred Scott v. Sandford.