Word: burger
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...time, the Nixon court sobriquet seemed apt. From 1969 to 1971, four Nixon appointees joined the court-Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justices Harry Blackmun, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell-and many observers expected them to reverse the trend set by the liberal Warren Court in the 1950s and '60s. Judicially activist, the Warren Court had frequently extended constitutional guarantees of free speech, equal protection and due process to safeguard individual rights, which usually meant those of the poor, minorities and criminal defendants. With the arrival of the Nixon appointees, the court was less concerned with the rights...
...pendulum has swung back to the left. Rather, court watchers say, the court has become distinctly nonideological. "They have no overarching doctrine," says Virginia Law Professor A.E. Dick Howard. "They're taking cases as they come in pragmatic fashion." In the early '70s some expected Chief Justice Burger to rally the court around him in conservative restraint, just the way his predecessor, Earl Warren, galvanized the court to judicial activism. But this year Blackmun abandoned Burger 30% of the tune, Powell 26%. Together with Justices John Paul Stevens, Potter Stewart and Byron White, they form an uncertain...
...Burger and his closest ally, Rehnquist, now stand increasingly isolated on the right, while Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan hang onto the Warren tradition on the left. "Fragmented moderation," Michigan Law Professor Vincent Blasi calls it. "Even when they get clear majorities," says Stanford Law Professor Gerald Gunther, "many different opinions come down. The Justices are tending to be loners, more isolated, less inclined to give and take...
...refusal to give the press unique access comes only four weeks after the court, in Zurcher vs. Stanford Daily, refused to grant journalists any special First Amendment protection from legal police searches. A few weeks before that, Burger declared in an opinion in another case that members of the press generally have no greater free speech rights than nonmembers. All this has convinced some journalists that the court is growing increasingly indifferent to the rights of the press. Says Jack Landau, director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: "The court feels the press is arrogant and greedy...
Last year, when Powell provided the deciding vote in a 5-to-4 ruling upholding suspects' rights to legal counsel while being questioned by police, he was rebuked from the bench by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Burger waspishly declared that with "only one convert" the court might some day restore "rationality" by voting the other...