A progressive justice,[citation needed] he was the author of the landmark rulings Yick Wo v. Hopkins and Ex parte Crow Dog Matthews was born July 21, 1824, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Other prominent members included future President William Howard Taft and notable club guests Ralph Waldo Emerson, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Robert Frost.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Matthews resigned as U.S. Attorney and accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel with the 23rd Ohio Infantry Regiment of the Union Army.

[8][9] Matthews served with the 23rd Ohio Infantry during the early campaigns in West Virginia and fought at the Battle of Carnifex Ferry on September 10, 1861.

[12] That same year Matthews won a special election to the Senate to fill a vacancy created by the resignation of John Sherman.

[18] In 1880, the city of San Francisco, California passed an ordinance that persons could not operate a laundry in a wooden building without a permit from the Board of Supervisors.

The Court, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Matthews, found that the administration of the statute in question was discriminatory and that there was therefore no need to even consider whether the ordinance itself was lawful.

Justice Matthews also noted that the court had previously ruled that it was acceptable to hold administrators of the law liable when they abused their authority.

[2] Over a three-week period, the outbreak claimed the lives of their three eldest sons (nine-year-old Morrison, six-year-old Stanley, and four-year-old Thomas) as well as younger daughter Mary (age two-and-a-half).

Their four younger children (Grace, Eva, Jane, and another son named Stanley, later called Paul) were born after the scarlet fever outbreak.

[25][26] Daughter Jane Matthews married her late father's colleague on the Court, Associate Justice Horace Gray, on June 4, 1889.

[27] Daughter Eva Lee Matthews became a schoolteacher and monastic, founding the Community of the Transfiguration, which engaged in charity work in Ohio, Hawaii and in China, leading to her liturgical commemoration in the Episcopal Church.

[29][30] A collection of Justice Matthews's correspondence and other papers is located at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center library in Fremont, Ohio and open for research.