Solomon Heydenfeldt

Solomon Heydenfeldt (1816 – September 15, 1890) was an American attorney who was an associate justice of the California Supreme Court from 1852 to 1857. He was the second Jewish justice of the court, after Henry A. Lyons, but was the first elected by direct vote of the people. He read law in the offices of William F. De Saussure, a son of the noted Chancellor Henry William de Saussure. which established the doctrine of prior appropriation in western water law jurisprudence. In March 1852, he returned to Alabama to visit his family, and his absence from the state led to a court opinion on whether his seat was "vacant".

In 1854, he concurred with a decision delivered by California Chief Justice Hugh Murray in People v. Hall, ruling that the use of testimony by black, mullato, and Indian witnesses against whites should also be extended to banning the testimony of Chinese witnesses.

On January 6, 1857, he stepped down from the bench, While in private practice, Heydenfeldt argued before the California Supreme Court in Ex Parte Newman (1858), where he successfully defended a Jewish man's right to work on Sunday.

In 1862, during the Civil War, he refused on principle to take a test oath for lawyers of loyalty to the Union cause against slavery (as did Virginia-born James D. Thornton), which led to his semi-retirement from the Bar. and then, in California, to Elisabeth A. Heydenfeldt, who survived him. He had ten children. His son, Solomon, graduated from Santa Clara University and in October 1872 became an attorney, and his nephew, Walter P. Levy, was a judge of the San Francisco Superior Court.