Word: brennans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...high court may offer Reagan a back-door means of achieving the New Right social agenda-- including permitting prayer in schools and banning abortion--that elected politicians in Congress have so far rebuffed. Time, certainly, is on the conservatives' side: the leading liberals on the court, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, are respectively 80 and 77 years old. Rehnquist is 61 and Scalia...
...opinion can set the terms of the debate. Burger repeatedly irked his colleagues by changing his vote to remain in the majority, and by rewarding his friends with choice assignments and punishing his foes with dreary ones. "Rehnquist is too intellectually honest to do this," says a former Brennan clerk. For Rehnquist the real question is whether he can be flexible enough to win over less dogmatic conservatives...
...court's Solomonic compromise in the famed 1978 affirmativeaction case Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke. Justice John Paul Stevens is a thoroughly unpredictable maverick, and Justice Harry Blackmun, once derided as Burger's "Minnesota Twin," is now often allied with the court's liberal duo, Brennan and Marshall...
...Rehnquist is looking for a model as consensus maker, he can find one in Brennan. Like Rehnquist, Brennan is popular with his colleagues. But unlike Rehnquist, Brennan has often swallowed his ideological scruples to pick up the votes of more moderate colleagues. His ability to preserve the legacy of the Warren Court on a bench well stocked with G.O.P. presidential appointees is testimony to his persuasiveness and collegiality...
...This court had a couple of Justices with vision," says University of Michigan Law Professor Yale Kamisar. "Brennan on the left and Rehnquist on the right. But nobody had the votes." As a result, the legacy of the Burger Court, insofar as it makes sense to speak of a Burger Court, lies mainly in the details. "It met the hard cases, decided the finer points and didn't push things along any further," says University of Texas Law Professor Scot Powe. For an era of rapid and thus often heated social change, that amounts to a respectable epitaph...