Rufus W. Peckham[a] (November 8, 1838 – October 24, 1909) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1896 to 1909, and is the most recent Democratic nominee approved by a Republican-majority Senate.

Peckham then returned to private legal practice and served as counsel to the City of Albany, until being elected as a trial judge on the New York Supreme Court in 1883.

By the time another seat on the Court was vacant after the death of Howell Edmunds Jackson in 1895, Hill was weakened politically and Cleveland turned to Rufus Peckham, who was confirmed within six days on December of that year (by a Republican-controlled Senate).

[8] His opinions on civil rights for African Americans are remarkable only for the abandonment of his usual anti-statism in voting to uphold Jim Crow laws–– the most notable being Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which he silently joined the majority.

[citation needed] His death came during what biographer Willard King calls "[p]erhaps the worst year in the history of the Court" – the term from October 1909 to May 1910 – when two justices died, the other being David J.

Mrs. Peckham was also the paternal aunt of heiress Dorothy Arnold, whose disappearance on December 12, 1910 was referenced, in 1928, as "the great search of the age" by United Press Associations (now UPI).