Except in the area of the law in which the Framers obviously meant it to applyâclassifications based on race or on national origin, the first cousin of raceâthe Court's decisions can fairly be described as an endless tinkering with legislative judgments, a series of conclusions unsupported by any central guiding principle. C. RAHDERT* I. At the time, Justice Rehnquist and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger represented the court's conservative wing. Rehnquist served as Justice from 1971, and Chief Justice from 1986 through his death in 2005. [7] In 1948, he received Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in political science, as well as an election to Phi Beta Kappa. [113][114] Nan Rehnquist died on October 17, 1991, aged 62, of ovarian cancer. He wrote: Our cases, Janus like, point in two directions in applying the Establishment Clause. [14], At his 1986 hearings for chief justice, Rehnquist tried to further distance himself from the 1952 memo, saying, "The bald statement that 'Plessy was right and should be reaffirmed' was not an accurate reflection of my own views at the time. [32] Once Bob Woodward revealed on May 31, 2005, that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat, this speculation ended. The Rehnquist court overruled 45 precedents over 19 years. He was completely unaffected in manner. The most famous, or infamous, case of Rehnquist's tenure was Bush v. Gore. [28] Rehnquist denied the charges, and Vincent Maggiore, then chairman of the Phoenix-area Democratic Party, said he had never heard any negative reports about Rehnquist's Election Day activities. "[94], For several weeks before his hospitalization, Rehnquist had slurred his words, but there were no indications he was otherwise impaired. [5] He attended Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, for one quarter in the fall of 1942 before entering the U.S. Army Air Forces. [84] Stone wrote: There were only three areas in which Rehnquist showed any interest in enforcing the constitutional guarantee of free expression: in cases involving advertising, religious expression, and campaign finance regulation.[84]. Rehnquist remained skeptical about the Court's Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence; some of his opinions most favorable to equality resulted from statutory rather than constitutional interpretation. Sandoval cited Cannon v. University of Chicago (1979) as precedent. The constitution restrains them from effecting this dislike through state action, but it most assuredly did not appoint the Court as a sociological watchdog to rear up every time private discrimination raises its admittedly ugly head.[5]. "The Rehnquist Court became the Kennedy Court," observed . The Justices on the Supreme Court can broadly be divided into two categories, but in reality it's a spectrum along which the Justices fall. Wiesenfeld. From his appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 until his death in 2005, Supreme Court Justice William Hubbs Rehnquist served as Chief Justice of the United States and became a conservative icon. This book is a legal biography of William Rehnquist of the U. S. Supreme Court. Rehnquist had no prior experience as a judge upon his appointment to the Court. Drawing on a series of decisions culminating in Casey, Part I examines the two conservative approaches to constitutional stare decisis competing for dominance on the Rehnquist Court. The figures are reported in David Paul Kuhn, "The Incredible Polarization and Politicization of the Supreme Court," The Atlantic, June 29, 2012. [47] In Trimble v. Gordon, Rehnquist eschewed the majority's approach to equal protection, writing in dissent in that the state's distinction should be sustained because it was not "mindless and patently irrational". [51] The Brethren claims that the court's "liberals found it hard not to like the good-natured, thoughtful Rehnquist", despite finding his legal philosophy "extreme",[52] and that Justice Stewart regarded Rehnquist as "excellent" and "a "team player, a part of the group in the center of the court, even though he usually ended up in the conservative bloc". All four dissenters disagreed with the Court's interpretation of the Commerce Clause, and two dissenters, Stevens and Breyer, also took issue with the Court's Equal Protection analysis. He served three months at Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma City, three months in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and then went to Hondo, Texas, for a few months. After several months out of the public eye, Rehnquist administered the oath of office to President George W. Bush at his second inauguration on January 20, 2005, despite doubts over whether his health would permit it. [30] In this role, he served as the chief lawyer to Attorney General John Mitchell. [17][18] A biography of Jackson corroborates this, stating that Jackson instructed his clerks to express their views, not his. [84] Excluding unanimous Court decisions, Rehnquist voted to reject First Amendment claims 92% of the time. Nixon mistakenly called him "Renchburg" in several of the tapes of Oval Office conversations revealed during the Watergate investigations.[31]. Ultimately, Yarbrough contends, Souter has become the principal Rehnquist Court opponent of the originalist, text-bound jurisprudence that many of the more conservative Justices profess to champion. Bill to obtain an undergraduate education and a law degree from Stanford. A lifelong fan of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, he liked the Lord Chancellor's costume in a community theater production of Iolanthe, and thereafter appeared in court with the same striped sleeves. David Shapiro, professor of law at Harvard University, wrote that while Rehnquist was an associate justice, he disliked even minimal inquiries into legislative objectives except in the areas of race, national origin, and infringement of specific constitutional guarantees. I saw factors on both sides. University of Chicago Law School Professor Geoffrey Stone has written that Rehnquist was by an impressive margin the justice least likely to invalidate a law as violating "the freedom of speech, or of the press". [3][4], Rehnquist graduated from Shorewood High School in 1942. "[19] In the same article, Rehnquist was quoted as retorting that "such attacks come from liberal academics and that 'on occasion, they write somewhat disingenuously about me'. In this work, Anna Harvey reports evidence showing that the Supreme Court is in fact extraordinarily deferential to congressional preferences in its constitutional rulings. Forty-three days after Rehnquist was sworn in as Chief Justice, the Fourth Circuit reversed the judgment, overruling Rehnquist, and concluding that there was insufficient evidence to have sent the matter to the jury.[66]. The daughter of a San Diego physician, she worked as an analyst on the CIA's Austria desk before their marriage. The "Roberts Court," then, has been more conservative than the Rehnquist Court only when Alito's vote has been different from what O'Connor's would have been, and where Kennedy was already with the conservatives in the first place on that particular issue. [16], Several commentators have concluded that the memo reflected Rehnquist's own views, not Jackson's. Was Bush v. Gore a political decision? Highlighting some of the dispositional problems with Rehnquist decisions, the book uses the sustainable case law standard instead of applauding either conservative or liberal point of view which provides new vantage points on topics like equal protection of women, due process in several arenas, contracts, free speech, sex, and guns. The Rehnquist Court's congruence and proportionality standard made it easier to revive older precedents preventing Congress from going too far[74] in enforcing equal protection of the laws.[75]. During the 1970s and into the '80s, the vigorous and articulate Rehnquist formed the anchor of the court He noted that, as a private citizen, Rehnquist had protested Brown v. Board of Education, and as a justice, consistently ruled against racial minorities in affirmative action cases. The dissent listed murder, polygamy, and cruelty to animals as behaviors that the Constitution allows states to be very hostile toward, and said "the degree of hostility reflected by Amendment 2 is the smallest conceivable." Often the more-liberal decisions . [105] Rehnquist's funeral was the largest gathering of political dignitaries at the cathedral since President John F. Kennedy's funeral in 1963. (CNN) The US Supreme Court is on the verge of a historic transformation that could wind back the law in America for decades, in . Many liberals saw the Rehnquist Court's federalism decisions as a thinly veiled attempt to further conservative policies. Although Rehnquist was to Burger's right,[61] "his colleagues were unanimously pleased and supportive", even his "ideological opposites". I did not agree then, and I certainly do not agree now, with the statement that "Plessy against Ferguson is right and should be reaffirmed." For a half century, from 1937 until as late as 1987, the Court could be characterized as moderate to liberal, for even the Burger Court, the Rehnquist Court's predecessor, turned out to be far less conservative than had been anticipated after Nixon appointed four justices. She was the first woman nominated and confirmed. Gore. The book concludes with an overall reflection on Rehnquist's legacy by Tom Wicker. [57] Rehnquist did not correct what The Brethren characterizes as an "outright misstatement, ... [and thus] publish[ed] an opinion that twisted the facts". This opinion was joined by Scalia, Thomas, Breyer, and Kennedy. On September 5, 2005, Bush withdrew the nomination of Judge John Roberts of the D.C. [27], Many years later, during his 1971 hearing for associate justice and his 1986 hearings for chief justice, several people came forward to complain about Rehnquist's participation in Operation Eagle Eye, a Republican attempt to discourage minority voters in Arizona elections, when he served as a poll watcher in the early 1960s. In a 5-4 decision, decided on clearly partisan lines, the Court halted Florida's recount and assured the victory of George W. Bush. -6 . . However it was written on July 1 and the following day the Supreme Court issued two more liberal decisions, refusing to review lower court judgments in Arlene's Flowers v.Washington (6-3) (impairing free exercise of religion) and Eychaner v. How Many People Were Killed by Hurricane Katrina? In 1992, Roe survived by a 5â4 vote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which relied heavily on the doctrine of stare decisis. His only experience in presiding over a case at the trial level was in 1984, when Judge D. Dortch Warriner invited him to preside over a civil case, Julian D. Heislup, Sr. and Linda L. Dixon, Appellees, v. Town of Colonial Beach, Virginia, et al. Justice Stevens, the most senior associate justice during much of the Rehnquist Court, led the liberal bloc, which also included Justices Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer. Rehnquist grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and served in the U.S. Army Air Forces during the final years of World War II. His grandfather Olof Andersson, who changed his surname from the patronymic Andersson to the family name Rehnquist, was born in the province of Värmland; his grandmother was born Adolfina Ternberg in the Vreta Kloster parish in Ãstergötland. In Bush v. Gore, he voted with the court's majority to end the Florida recount in the 2000 presidential election. The majority also viewed it as significant that §602 of Title VI did not repeat the rights-creating language (race, color, or national origin) in §601. The Legacy of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, 5 Reasons You Should Ignore the Presidential Campaign Coverage, The United States in 100 Years, A Prediction, The History of the United States, in 10,000 Words, Joseph McCarthy, and Other Facets of the 1950s Red Scare. [112] The couple had three children: James, a lawyer and college basketball star; Janet, a lawyer; and Nancy, an editor (including of her father's books) and homemaker. As indicated by Table 2.8, the conservative Rehnquist Court's regular support for liberal outcomes in criminal justice cases is consistent with these studies. This is not a . Despite this and other controversies, including concern over his membership in the Alfalfa Club (which at the time did not allow women to join),[63] the Senate confirmed his appointment, 65â33 (49â2 in the Senate Republican Conference, with Barry Goldwater and Jake Garn abstaining, and 16â31 in the Senate Democratic Caucus),[64] and he took office on September 26. Many commentators expected to see the federal government's power limited and state governments' power increased. On desegregation, birth control, the rights of the accused, school busing and school prayer, and abortion, the Court issued decisions that challenged the foundations of American law and society. [47] (The court struck down an Illinois law allowing illegitimate children to inherit by intestate succession only from their mothers.) In response, the Morrison majority asserted that the Violence Against Women Act was "directed not at any State or state actor, but at individuals who have committed criminal acts motivated by gender bias". His family was conservative and Rehnquist remained a conservative for his entire life. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist to succeed retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, and the Senate confirmed him. It evaluates not the substantive merits of Casey but rather the relative strengths of the different arguments regarding constitutional stare decisis put for ward in Casey by the Reagan and Bush appointees to the Rehnquist Court. The Senate, which voted 98-0 for Scalia in 1986, would confirm both nominees—and if Gonzales or Garza proved less conservative than Rehnquist, the Court would tip to the left. "[12] Jackson's longtime secretary and confidante Elsie Douglas said during Rehnquist's 1986 hearings that his allegation was "a smear of a great man, for whom I served as secretary for many years. ", "Illinois General Assembly - Full Text of HR0622", "O'Connor, Rehnquist And A Supreme Marriage Proposal", "Rehnquist left Supreme Court with conservative legacy", "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases", "132 Cong. So do the similar evolutions of Anthony Kennedy, another . Rehnquist's 1952 memo, "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases", defended the separate-but-equal doctrine. [79] Similarly, in Lawrence, "moral disapproval" was found to be an unconstitutional basis for condemning a group of people. [41] During the Burger Court's deliberations over Roe v. Wade, Rehnquist promoted his view that court's jurisdiction does not apply to abortion. Bill. Did the Mayflower Go Off Course on Purpose? One of the Rehnquist Court's major developments involved reinforcing and extending the doctrine of sovereign immunity,[76] which limits the ability of Congress to subject non-consenting states to lawsuits by individual citizens seeking money damages. Scholars use the most advanced methods in judicial studies to examine the role of Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Among the many closely watched decisions during Rehnquist's tenure was Romer v. Evans (1996). Considered a conservative, Rehnquist favored a conception of federalism that emphasized the Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to the states. Available as a single volume or as part of the 10 volume set Supreme Court in American Society He almost always voted "with the prosecution in criminal cases, with business in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases, and with the government in speech cases. From the 1953 appointment of Earl Warren through the 1970s, the Supreme Court took a decidedly liberal tack in its jurisprudence. On the Burger Court, Rehnquist promptly established himself as Nixon's most conservative appointee, taking a narrow view of the Fourteenth Amendment and a broad view of state power. [49] Shapiro alleges that Rehnquist's stance "makes rational basis a virtual nullity". The other face looks toward the principle that governmental intervention in religious matters can itself endanger religious freedom. INTRODUCTION. Black died on September 25, 1971, and Harlan died on December 29 of that year. He later returned to Stanford to attend the Stanford Law School, where he became an editor of the Stanford Law Review and graduated first in his class in 1952 with a Bachelor of Laws. [67] By contrast, Rehnquist won fellow justices over with his easygoing, humorous, and unpretentious personality. [104] Rehnquist's body lay in repose in the Great Hall of the United States Supreme Court Building until his funeral on September 7, a Lutheran service conducted at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush and Justice O'Connor eulogized Rehnquist, as did members of his family. On September 6, 2005, eight of Rehnquist's former law clerks, including Judge John Roberts, his eventual successor, served as pallbearers as his casket was placed on the same catafalque that bore Abraham Lincoln's casket as he lay in state in 1865. After his Supreme Court clerkship, Rehnquist entered private practice in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked from 1953 to 1969. Rehnquist quickly established himself as the Burger Court's most conservative member. By: Toobin, Jeffrey Contributor(s): Leslie, Don Publisher: New York : Books on Tape, 2007 ISBN: 1415942358 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book); 9781415942352 (sound recording : OverDrive Audio Book) Subject(s): United States. For example, "One doctor said Rehnquist thought he heard voices outside his hospital room plotting against him and had 'bizarre ideas and outrageous thoughts', including imagining 'a CIA plot against him' and seeming to see the design patterns on the hospital curtains change configuration. The United States has a distinctive dualist government system whereby the elected government must share its responsibilities with parties that have no mandate from the people. By analogy, the Romer dissent reasoned that: If it is rational to criminalize the conduct, surely it is rational to deny special favor and protection to those with a self avowed tendency or desire to engage in the conduct. For other uses, see, Equal protection, civil rights, and abortion, Rehnquist's view of the rational basis test, Herman J. Obermayer, Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States (2009 Simon and Schuster) pp.24â26. 369, 371 (2004) ("Nor has the Rehnquist Court been strongly conservative."). Though he remained a member of the conservative wing of the court, Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas were often regarded as more conservative. The decision depended on some out-of-character interpretations of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause from the Court's more conservative justices, who furthermore dictated that aspects of their reasoning should not be referred to as precedent on subsequent cases. The dissent argued as follows (some punctuation omitted): General laws and policies that prohibit arbitrary discrimination would continue to prohibit discrimination on the basis of homosexual conduct as well. Harry A. Blackmun: The Outsider Justice is Tinsley E. Yarbrough's penetrating account of one of the most outspoken and complicated figures on the Supreme Court. As a justice, Blackmun stood at the pinnacle of the American judiciary. IS THE Rehnquist Court conservative? Dissenting in Casey, Rehnquist criticized the Court's "newly minted variation on stare decisis", and asserted "that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases". Step-by-Step Strategy Produced Strides for Equal Protection". One simply needs to imagine the 5-4 decision that would have been passed down had the circumstances been reversed, and had Al Gore held the lead instead of Bush. thought Plessy had been wrongly decided at the time, that it was not a good interpretation of the equal protection clause to say that when you segregate people by race, there is no denial of equal protection. In contrast, the Roberts Court has decided 21.5 percent of its cases by a 5-to-4 ruling, the highest share of any court, and the Rehnquist Court has decided 20.5 percent of its cases by that margin. Exercising the authority of a Supreme Court justice to preside over lower court proceedings, he oversaw the jury trial involving allegations that police department employees' civil rights were violated when they testified in a matter involving alleged police brutality against a teenage boy. Under this view of federalism, the court, for the first time since the 1930s, struck down an act of Congress as exceeding its power under the Commerce Clause. 10:10 PM. Even before Ronald Reagan and Edwin Meese made originalism the touchstone of conservative . [88], Charles Fried has described the Rehnquist Court's "project" as "to reverse not the course of history but the course of constitutional doctrine's abdication to politics". Rehnquist died at his Arlington, Virginia, home on September 3, 2005, four weeks before his 81st birthday. Rehnquist is one of two chief justices of Swedish descent, the other being Earl Warren, who had Norwegian and Swedish ancestry. issues where there are clear liberal and conservative positions, Justice Kennedy is the swing vote."3 As to the Court's conservatism, Chemerinsky states as follows: What does it mean to say that the Court is more conservative than its predecessor courts, the Rehnquist, Burger and Warren Courts? "Rehnquist" redirects here. With exceptional efficiency and amiability he led a Court that put the brakes on some of the excesses of the Earl Warren era while keeping pace with the sentiments of a majority of the countryâgenerally siding with economic conservatives and against cultural conservatives. However, conservative decisions made thus far by the Roberts Court — and by prior courts under the two former chief justices — far outweigh the liberal ones. [40] He later extended what he said he saw as the amendment's scope, writing in Trimble v. Gordon, "except in the area of the law in which the Framers obviously meant it to applyâclassifications based on race or on national origin". It means, in direct translation to English: Woodward & Armstrong, The Brethren 267 (2005) (1979 ed. [99] But during his absence, he remained involved in Court business, participating in many decisions and deliberations. When Rehnquist can muster a five-member conservative majority, they say, the high court . [19] He usually voted with Burger,[60] andârecognizing "the importance of his relationship with Burger"âoften went along to get along, joining Burger's majority opinions even when he disagreed with them, and, in important cases, "tr[ying] to straighten him out". )[69] His successor, Chief Justice John Roberts, chose not to continue the practice. In 1992, Rehnquist joined a dissenting opinion in Lee v. Weisman that the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment only forbids government from preferring one particular religion over another. [11], In both his 1971 Senate confirmation hearing for associate justice and his 1986 hearing for chief justice, Rehnquist testified that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views rather than his own. [79], Rehnquist sometimes reached results favorable to homosexuals, for example voting to allow a gay CIA employee to sue on the basis of constitutional law for improper personnel practices (although barring suit on the basis of administrative law in deference to a claim of national security reasons),[80] to allow same-sex sexual harassment claims to be adjudicated,[81] and to allow the University of WisconsinâMadison to require students to pay a mandatory fee that subsidized gay groups along with other student organizations.[82]. A practical result of Rehnquist's view of rational basis can be seen in Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, wherein the Court's majority struck down a school board rule that required every pregnant teacher to take unpaid maternity leave beginning five months before the expected birth of her child.
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