It is the second comprehensive treatise on the provisions of the U.S. Constitution and remains a critical source of historical information about the forming of the American republic and the early struggles to define its law.

[2] R. Kent Newmyer presents Story as a "Statesman of the Old Republic" who tried to be above democratic politics and to shape the law in accordance with the republicanism of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, and the New England Whigs of the 1820s and 1830s, including Daniel Webster.

[3] Historians generally agree that Story reshaped American law—as much or more than Marshall or anyone else—in a conservative direction that protected property rights.

His first wife, Ruth (née Ruddock) died and Story remarried in November 1778, to Mehitable Pedrick, nineteen, the daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant who lost his fortune during the war.

)[8] As a boy, Joseph studied at the Marblehead Academy until the fall of 1794, where he was taught by schoolmaster William Harris, later president of Columbia University.

At Marblehead he chastised a fellow schoolmate and Harris responded by beating him in front of the school; his father withdrew him immediately afterward.

[9] Story was accepted at Harvard University in January 1795;[10] he joined Adelphi, a student-run literary review, and was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa society.

[13] Story's wife, Mary Lynde Fitch Oliver, died in June 1805, shortly after their marriage and two months after the death of his father.

Their son became a noted poet and sculptor—his bust of his father was mounted in the Harvard Law School Library—who would later publish The Life and Letters of Joseph Story (2 vols., Boston and London, 1851).

[19] On November 15, 1811, Story was nominated by President James Madison to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, succeeding William Cushing,[1] who had died 14 months earlier.

Without uniformity, each state would be allowed to develop its own idiosyncrasies, and such provincialism ran contrary to Story's aim of a national republic.

Following the death of the chief justice and the arrival of the Age of Jackson, Story, for the first time on the bench, seemed out of step with the rest of the Court.

The Court ruled 4–2 in favor of the Warren Bridge, rejecting the petitioners' claim that their charter granted them exclusive rights.

Story was forced to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania personal liberty law which placed procedural requirements on those seeking to extradite fugitive slaves.

Despite the fact that slavery was not mentioned, Story concluded that it was all too clear that the clause was meant to secure runaway slaves for southern slaveholders.

He went on to note, "The full recognition of the right and title was indispensable to the security of this species of property in all the slaveholding States; and, indeed, was so vital to the preservation of their domestic interests and institutions, that it cannot be doubted that it constituted a fundamental article, without the adoption of which the Union could not have been formed.

"[25] Story's apparent endorsement of slaveholders' rights must be read through this light: that the justice felt that this was a bargain integral to the Constitution.

H. Robert Baker notes, "Story chose the path that he believed best supported a strong Union and rejected the natural right of slaveholders to the people they claimed as property.

His resonating opinion answered southern constitutional claims in ways that protected slaveholders' rights, but not on the terms they wanted.

Story, ever the nationalist, had long despised using state statutes as authoritative when he deemed federal common law a much more preferable alternative.

Though Story, writing for the unanimous majority, rejected the fraudulent Bill of Exchange, this remains less significant than his development of federal common law.

As aforementioned, section 34 of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789 held that courts were bound to local state statutes.

Story, though had long desired to establish federal common law, had been unable to sway sufficient support to the cause.

He noted that "[Section 34 of the Judiciary Act], upon its true intendment and construction, is strictly limited to local statutes and local usages of the character before stated, and does not extend to contracts and other instruments of a commercial nature..."[27] Swift's ultimate overruling in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins marked a turning point in American civil procedure.

[28] In 1829, he moved from Salem to Cambridge and became the first Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University, meeting with remarkable success as a teacher and winning the affection of his students, who had the benefit of learning from a sitting Supreme Court justice.

[29] Many legal scholars attribute the development of remittitur in American law – a procedural device by which the trial judge can reduce a jury's damages award in a civil suit on the grounds that it is excessive – to Story's decision in the 1822 case Blunt v. Little (in which Story was sitting on the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts).

While aspects of his jurisprudence would fall into the minority with the rise of Jackson, he continued to guide the Constitutional dialogue through cases like Prigg and Swift.

"[36] Justice Story spoke at the dedication ceremony for Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831, which set the model for dozens of subsequent addresses over the next few decades.