McReynolds is best known today for his sustained opposition to the domestic programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his personality, which was widely viewed negatively and included documented elements of overt antisemitism and racism.

Wilson nominated McReynolds to the Supreme Court in 1914 to fill the vacancy caused by Associate Justice Horace Harmon Lurton's death.

During his Supreme Court tenure, McReynolds wrote the majority opinion in cases such as Meyer v. Nebraska, United States v. Miller, Adams v. Tanner, and Pierce v. Society of Sisters.

Due to his temperament, bigotry, and his opposition to the domestic programs of the FDR administration, McReynolds is sometimes included on lists of the worst Supreme Court justices.

[5][14][15] On August 19, 1914, Wilson nominated McReynolds as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court,[16] to succeed Horace H. Lurton.

[21] As a confirmed opponent of federal authority aimed toward social ends or economic regulation, McReynolds had the "single-minded passion of a zealot".

He wrote: "I can not find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States".

[22][5] McReynolds wrote two early decisions using the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil liberties: Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925).

In overturning the conviction on substantive due process grounds, McReynolds wrote that the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment included an individual's right "to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, to establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, and generally to enjoy privileges, essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men".

McReynolds wrote the decision in United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), the only Supreme Court case directly involving the Second Amendment until District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008.

[C] Chief Justice William Howard Taft thought him selfish, prejudiced and mean: "[H]e has a continual grouch, and is always offended because the court is doing something that he regards as undignified.

[36] When Benjamin Cardozo's appointment was being pressed on President Herbert C. Hoover, McReynolds joined Justices Pierce Butler and Willis Van Devanter in urging the White House not to "afflict the Court with another Jew".

[39] When news of Cardozo's appointment was announced, McReynolds is claimed to have said "Huh, it seems that the only way you can get on the Supreme Court these days is to be either the son of a criminal or a Jew, or both.

"[46]—was refuted by Supreme Court historian Franz Jantzen, as cited by T. C. Peppers in the Richmond Public Interest Law Review.

[47][2]) In 1922, Taft proposed that members of the Court accompany him to Philadelphia on a ceremonial occasion, but McReynolds refused, writing: "As you know, I am not always to be found when there is a Hebrew abroad.

[50] Once, when colleague Harlan Fiske Stone remarked to him of an attorney's brief: "That was the dullest argument I ever heard in my life", McReynolds replied: "The only duller thing I can think of is to hear you read one of your opinions.

Justices Pierce Butler and Willis Van Devanter transferred from the club to Burning Tree because McReynolds "got disagreeable even beyond their endurance".

[53] Once when called before the chairman of the Golf Committee to answer complaints filed against him, McReynolds said, "I've been a member of this club a good many years, and no one around here has ever shown me any courtesy, so I don't intend to show any to anyone else."

[5] For example, he gave very generous assistance and adopted 33 children who were victims of the German bombing of London in 1940, and left a sizable fortune to charity.

McReynolds picked him up, helped him back to his seat, and sat beside him until they reached the top of Capitol Hill, leaving him only after giving explicit instructions to the conductor.

[58] When he was required to preside in court, due to absence of more senior justices, "he was the soul of courtesy, graciously greeting and raptly listening to the arguments by lawyers of both sexes.

He entertained frequently at the Willard Hotel with guest lists of 150 people, including his fellow justices, and at an annual eggnog party that was one of the social highlights of the Christmas season.

Alice Roosevelt, one of many friends, requested the services of his cook, Mrs. Parker, for her wedding breakfast on the occasion of her marriage to Nicholas Longworth.

[59] After a substantial hearing loss in 1925, McReynolds strongly intended to resign from the Court, and was dissuaded only by requests by many friends, who called him "one of the few who have courageously stood for the rights of property and of the citizen.

The Christian Science Monitor hailed McReynolds in tribute as "the last and lone champion on the Supreme Bench battling the steady encroachment of Federal powers on State and individual rights ... standing these later years at the Pass of Thermopylae".

Those who regularly interacted with McReynolds—his fellow justices, his long-time messenger, his domestic staff, his law clerks, and even members of his country club—were targets of his snobbery and vitriol.

Chief Justice William Howard Taft himself once described McReynolds as a 'continual grouch' and 'selfish to the last degree... fuller of prejudice than any man I have ever known... one who delights in making others uncomfortable.

[39] While conceding that McReynolds had racist and religious prejudices, Jantzen ends with an important warning: 'We can only truly take the measure of the man by using those things that he actually said and did...not by using myth and innuendo.

In a 1939 Time article, the magazine raised a familiar set of charges against the Justice: he was a man "intolerably rude, antiSemitic [sic], savagely sarcastic, incredibly reactionary, Puritanical, prejudiced.

"[41] The same article, however, observed that the McReynolds 'legend' (an important choice of words) 'had little to say about his tenderness to his narrow circle of friends, his unfailing generosity, his clear legal perception, his unerring eye and ear for the false, the unessential.'"