Morris Lyon Buchwalter (September 8, 1846 – March 12, 1924)[1] was a radical Ohio Republican jurist of the post-Civil War era whose jurisprudence set a progressive standard following the failure of Reconstruction and during the rise in management/labor tensions in the Gilded Age.

His roommate with future Ohio Senator, Joseph Benson Foraker, who served with Buchwalter's brother in the Tennessee campaign.

Buchwlater began general practice in Cincinnati and gained recognition as an energetic, reliable and progressive young lawyer.

Buchwalter was thought to be a highly impartial jurist, and his decisions ranked among the clearest expositions of law enunciated from the common pleas bench in the 19th century.

"[4]In 1885, the Judge heard a case involving the menace of roller coasters: Now that a "roller coaster" is ready to be launched upon the local public at Savin Rock, it is interesting to learn from the Boston Herald that Judge Buchwalter of Cincinnati, has been occupied an entire day with the hearing of testimony in a complaint case against one of them.

Henry A. Morill and a number of other property owners and residents in the vicinity of the Bellevue house, in Cincinnati, are the plaintiffs, and David Billigheimer the defendant.

The plaintiffs allege that the "roller coaster" or circular gravity railway, recently constructed on the Bellevue house grounds, is a nuisance to the neighborhood, on account of the noise it produces; that it prevents sleep, tortures invalids and nervous people, interrupts conversations, and will depreciate the value of property in that vicinity unless its further operation is enjoined, which the plaintiffs pray the court may be done by a perpetual injunction.

Buchwalter's order from the bench included an admonishment against vigilante justice on the other side of the Ohio river: "I determined then I would never send another prisoner South unless I had assurance he would be protected from a mob and given a fair trial.

He wrote an extensive study of Free Masonry and belonged to the Scottish Rite, being a thirty-third degree member of the order having been elected as such in 1894.

He was interred at Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery, 69 paces from the grave of his fraternity brother, Senator Joseph Benson Forake.