Four justices dissented from the Court's decision, and three of them wrote dissenting opinions. Justice Stephen J. Field protested that Miller's narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment rendered it "a vain and idle enactment, which accomplished nothing, and most unnecessarily excited Congress and the people on its passage." Field accepted Campbell's reading of the amendment as not confined to protection of freed slaves but embracing the common law presumption in favor of an individual right to pursue a legitimate occupation. Field's reading of the due process clause of the amendment would prevail in future cases in which the court read the amendment broadly to protect personal interests against hostile state laws.