Word: brennans
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...Ronald Reagan is re-elected and the court loses either of its two aging liberals, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the conservative drift could become a sea change. The right to abortion, affirmative action for blacks and women, the ban on school prayer, many procedural safeguards for criminal suspects and free-speech rights would be vulnerable to weakening, if not outright reversal. Says University of Minnesota Law School Associate Professor Daniel Farber: "We could basically end up with the law looking a lot like it did before 1954. We could expect a much more conservative court, a Warren Court...
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...
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...
Last year, Blackmun refused to rule on the merits of the Ames case in order to avoid setting a legal precedent in moot court, Schiff said. While Brennan may avoid voicing an opinion on the legal issues involved in this year's case, the competition could influence future legal rulings, because attorneys engaged in similar disputes may draw on students' arguments...