During his first term as president, Cleveland appointed Lucius Q. C. Lamar, his former secretary of the interior, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Senate barely confirmed Lamar by a vote of thirty-two to twenty-eight, in part because he has served for the Confederacy in the Civil War. He served only five years on the Court. Cleveland also appointed Melville W. Fuller as chief justice as a replacement Morrison Waite. Fuller served on the Court for twenty-two years and proved an able administrator of the Court.

During his second term as president, Cleveland appointed Edward D. White, who served twenty-seven years on the Court, as an associate justice until 1910, when President William Howard Taft elevated him to Chief Justice. He became the first justice to serve as both associate justice and chief justice. Cleveland’s second appointment during his second term was Rufus Peckham, a conservative justice who served thirteen years on the Court. He is best known for writing the Court’s majority opinion in Lochner v. New York (1905), where the Court struck down a law limiting the number of hours bakery employees could work under a freedom-of-contract theory.