[Mb-civic] The Rehnquist Legacy: 33 Years Turning Back the Court - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Rehnquist Legacy: 33 Years Turning Back the Court
Chief Justice Came to Recognize Limits On His Power to Fight Liberal Drift

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 5, 2005; Page A08

A version of this story appeared in some late editions yesterday.

As a young lawyer in Phoenix in 1957, William Hubbs Rehnquist declared a 
personal war of sorts against the Supreme Court, then headed by Chief 
Justice Earl Warren.

Rehnquist gave a speech criticizing Warren and Justice Hugo Black as 
"left-wing philosophers." He published a magazine article blaming the 
Warren court's liberal drift on the "political cast" of the justices' 
law clerks.

Rehnquist's effort to roll back the modern liberal tide would take him 
to Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater's ill-fated 1964 presidential 
campaign, to the Nixon administration's Justice Department and 
eventually, in 1972, to the court itself.

After 33 years there, including almost 19 occupying Warren's old seat as 
chief justice, Rehnquist can claim a substantial legacy.

The Rehnquist Court has strengthened the legal position of the police, 
paved the way for swifter executions, defined constitutional limits on 
federal power and permitted indirect government funding of religious 
schools.

"When the history of the Supreme Court in the 20th century is written, 
there will be two great chief justices: Earl Warren and William 
Rehnquist," said Mark Tushnet, a professor at the Georgetown University 
Law Center. "Both presided over courts that changed the law in a very 
dramatic way."

Yet by the last years of his tenure, Rehnquist had come to appreciate 
the limitations on any individual's power to blaze new trails through 
the thick forest known as American law.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/04/AR2005090401251.html
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