Word: burger
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Over the years, Burger's tendency to flip-flop has given rise to conspiracy theories about his motives, notes TIME Correspondent Douglas Brew. When 'the Chief votes with the majority, he has the right to decide who should write the opinion of the court and provide the reasoning behind the decision. If he is in the minority, the most senior member of the majority assigns the task. According to former Supreme Court law clerks, Burger has, at times, held back or switched his vote to keep control of the opinion assignment, a practice the clerks call "phony voting...
...case in point is Roe vs. Wade, the controversial 1973 decision striking down state laws that prohibited abortion. According to clerks on the court at the time, Burger joined the majority to keep the opinion away from the then senior Justice, William O. Douglas. The most liberal member of the court, Douglas wanted to base the decision on a broad constitutional right to privacy. Burger preferred a more narrowly drawn opinion, one that would invite the states to replace rigid with less restrictive abortion laws. As a furious Douglas accused Burger of abusing the assigning power, the Chief gave...
...once been general counsel, to research the medical aspects of abortion. After he emerged, he wrote a broad opinion declaring that abortion, at least in the first trimester, was a matter for a woman and her doctor, not the state, to decide. That was hardly the reasoning Burger had hoped for. The Chief eventually added a cryptic concurring opinion arguing that the court's decision did not sanction ''abortion on demand''-though that was precisely what Blackmun meant...
Most sources agree that Burger has been found lacking on both counts. A Justice's written opinion is his most effective tool of persuasion. ''Votes change in the writing perhaps more often than in conference,'' says Justice Byron R. White. Yet Burger's colleagues find that drafts of his opinions often carry mistakes or gaps of logic; of the final product, Stanford Constitutional Expert Gerald Gunther says, ''Only in rare opinions do you get a carefully thought-out, well-developed argument...
...Burger has played a much more visible leadership role off the bench. He likes to point out that his title is not Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, it is Chief Justice of the U.S. More than any Chief since William Howard Taft, who served 50 years ago, Burger has been concerned with the administration of justice in the U.S. In speeches, interviews and articles, he is constantly proposing ways to help courts cope with their huge backlogs...