Peter Vivian Daniel (April 24, 1784 – May 31, 1860) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

His second wife, the Pennsylvania-born widow Elizabeth Hodgson Harris (1824–1857) died tragically when a lit candle accidentally set her clothing afire, leaving Daniel grief-stricken.

[12] In the 1850 federal census, his grown lawyer son Peter Daniel Jr. lived at home with his father and unmarried sisters, as well as two white servants, and the family owned five slaves.

[15] In 1807 Daniel was admitted to the Virginia bar and began a private legal practice in Falmouth across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg.

In 1809, Stafford County voters elected him to the Virginia House of Delegates, and re-elected him once, so he served in that part-time position first alongside his relative John Moncure and then with William Brent.

[16] Daniel championed states' rights principles embodied in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, and promoted agrarian issues and strict construction of the federal Constitution.

[18] During the 1830s, he was a member of the Richmond Junto, a powerful group of the Jacksonian Democrats and slaveholders, and strongly supported both Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren.

On February 26, 1841, outgoing President Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, nominated Daniel as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, again to succeed Barbour (who had died).

Daniel wrote: Concurring entirely, as I do, with the majority of the court, in the conclusions they have reached relative to the effect and validity of the statute of Pennsylvania now under review, it is with unfeigned regret that I am constrained to dissent from some of the principles and reasonings which that majority, in passing to our common conclusions, have believed themselves called on to affirm.He also joined the majority in Jones v. Van Zandt (1847) and wrote another concurring opinion a decade later in Dred Scott v. Sandford, to state that "the African negro race never have been acknowledged as belonging to the family of nations.