Word: burger
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from border checkpoints to search for illegal aliens. If such cases did not add up to a banner year of decision making, court watchers were nonetheless fascinated by a potentially important change within the court: the continuing emergence of Harry Blackmun, 66, from the shadow of Chief Justice Warren Burger and the resultant cracks in the so-called Nixon bloc...
Friends from boyhood days back in St. Paul, Burger and Blackmun were quickly dubbed the court's Minnesota Twins. Blackmun's elevation to the court from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals was prompted by Burger's endorsement, and in Blackmun's first term the two differed on only 10% of the cases. They have never again been so much in accord, but a key split took place last July after the Chief wrote a draft of the court's unanimous opinion in U.S. v. Nixon, the explosive Executive privilege case. Most of the Justices...
During the current term, Burger and Blackmun disagreed 20% of the time. More important, Blackmun's opinions reflected a somewhat surer sense of his role as a Supreme Court Justice, and even occasionally a more liberal bent. In two cases involving antitrust law and criminal procedure, his vote tipped the result 5 to 4 against the conservatives. In a First Amendment case, Burger may have been following Blackmun. The junior Minnesotan expanded the free-speech protection of advertisements and cited with approval a dissent from an opinion he himself had written only a year earlier. Once its slowest writer...
More Middle. Blackmun's maturing and rising independence has jostled court alignments. The four Justices nominated by Richard Nixon-Burger (1969), Blackmun (1970), Lewis Powell (1971) and William Rehnquist (1971)-at first seemed to be a reliable bloc that promised to move the court away from Warren-era liberalism. But Powell has at times made the foursome a threesome; and with Blackmun more of a question mark, Burger and Rehnquist are now the most certain votes on the right. The liberals-William Douglas, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall-remain in general agreement. And, to be sure, they are still...
Wrong Names. In recent months there have been reports that Douglas was getting some coworkers' names wrong and that he once even mistook his own chambers for those of Chief Justice Warren Burger. He has chosen not to participate in some 25 cases and has not written a major opinion in 1975, though he has filed a few short dissents. In one such dissent last week he gamely reiterated his feeling that the court is not overworked, as the Chief Justice persistently argues. Wrote Douglas: "I have found it a comfortable burden carried even in my months of hospitalization...