James Moore Wayne (1790 – July 5, 1867) was an American attorney, judge and politician who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1835 to 1867.

His sister Mary Wayne, wife of Richard Stites, was the great-grandmother of Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA.

[4] From 1812 to 1815, during the War of 1812, he served in the United States Army as a captain in the Chatham Light Dragoons, now known as the Georgia Hussars.

A "Jacksonian", Wayne agreed with President Jackson on the ideals of deepening rivers and harbors, but disagreed on the expansions of highways and canals.

The fact that Wayne refused to accept the Indians as an independent nation and forced them to move west, made him appealing to Georgians.

In these statements, Justice Wayne was explaining how owners stopped being relevant and that businesses now had easy accessibility to federal courts.

Though the Court thought this ruling would put to rest the question of slavery, it exacerbated tensions and may have led directly to the American Civil War, which resulted in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1865) abolishing slavery, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1868), granting equal citizenship to African-Americans.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Taney wrote that the Constitution viewed people of African American descent as an "inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect" (60 U.S. 393).

The vast majority of scholars and historians[11] view this decision, which Justice Wayne concurred with, as one of the worst to ever be handed down by the Court.

Justice Wayne showed his concurrence with Taney when he wrote: "Concurring as I do entirely in the opinion of the court as it has been written and read by the Chief Justice" (60 U.S. 393), he went on to write that he concurred in "assuming that the Circuit Court had jurisdiction," but he abstained from expressing any opinion upon the eighth section of the act of 1820, known commonly as the Missouri Compromise law, and "six of us declare that it was unconstitutional" (60 U.S. 393).

He held to this in the Dred Scott case, supporting Chief Justice Taney's opinion in the face of harsh criticism by many.

[12] Together, Mary and James were the parents of two surviving children: Between 1818 to 1820, he built a Regency-style home at 10 East Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah.

[4] During World War II the Liberty ship SS James M. Wayne was built in Brunswick, Georgia, and named in his honor.