Word: brennans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan would certainly try to choose conservatives, just as Mondale would surely attempt to pick liberals. With both Brennan and Marshall nearing retirement, Mondale would need a whole raft of appointments to revive the liberal activism of the Warren era. More likely, he would only be able to prop up the court's aging left wing. The court as a whole would continue to drift, advancing here, trimming back there...
...President who appointed them. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, expected Oliver Wendell Holmes to uphold his trust-busting legislation. When Holmes disappointed him, Roosevelt exclaimed, "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that!" Dwight Eisenhower had no reason to think that Warren and Brennan would turn out to be flaming liberals; Ike later regretted Warren's appointment as his worst mistake. "People change on the court," says Dennis Hutchinson of the University of Chicago Law School. "They're not cookie-cutter ideologues...
...there is little collegiality. "It's not like you walk into a room and four of them are laughing together about a baseball game," says a former law clerk for Brennan. "They walk to conference arm in arm, but during the week they don't pal around together." Justice Lewis Powell calls the Brethren "nine one-man law firms." Says Blackmun: "There is very little humor...
Says Steven Reiss of New York University Law School, a former clerk for Brennan: "Calling this the Burger Court is a complete misnomer. He is the least analytical and the least astute, and he has the least time for the substantive work of the court." Burger has irked some of his colleagues, who suspect that he has used his power to assign the written opinions of the court to reward his friends and punish his enemies...
...Connor is a likely vote against abortion The staunchest defenders of the decision-Brennan, Marshall and Blackmun-are all at least 75 years old. "All of our guys are the old men," says Nanette Falkenberg, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League. The court, it would appear, is already primed for a switch; a single appointment might be all the shove that it needs. But even for a determinedly conservative court, reversing Roe would be a momentous step. Since so many women have relied on the decision, says Columbia's Blasi, to overturn it "would be Prohibition...