Davis, John William (1873-1955), a famous American constitutional lawyer, was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States in 1924. He lost to Calvin Coolidge. As a constitutional lawyer, Davis argued 140 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, more than anyone had argued up to that time. Many considered him the country's most distinguished constitutional lawyer. But he lost his last and most famous case, his Supreme Court defense of South Carolina's public school segregation laws in 1954.