Word: burger
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although McDonald's claims it is not embarrassed by the discovery, the burger giant (30 billion sold to date) admits it is redesigning the coffee stirrers so they can be used only by sippers, not snorters...
...twelve Justices portrayed in the book, Burger receives the harshest verdict. He is limned as a vain and petty man who consistently tries to bend or ignore the court's rules in order to get his way. His frequent vote switching exasperates his colleagues: after one flipflop, Justice Byron White threw his pencil on the conference table and shouted, "Jesus Christ, here we go again!" The chief is portrayed as a legal lightweight whose opinions are shoddy and poorly thought out. Of one Burger opinion dealing with court-ordered school busing in Detroit, Justice Lewis Powell is quoted...
...book is sprinkled with homey detail. "What's shakin', chiefy baby?" is Marshall's jocular greeting to a startled Burger. At the height of the Agnew scandal in 1973, Baseball Buff Stewart had his clerks slip him play-by-play bulletins on the National League playoffs between the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Mets as he sat on the bench. One note read: "Kranepool flies to right. Agnew resigns." The Brethren also reports some tantalizing What Ifs. The court came within a vote of, in effect, judicially establishing the Equal Rights Amendment: Stewart held back only...
...criticized for years. But a Justice has to persuade his colleagues to produce a five-man majority; votes change and compromises are struck as individual opinions are exposed to the often withering scrutiny of the whole court. Ego clashes are not surprising, nor are they unique to just the Burger Court. Indeed, insiders consider this court less fractious than some of its predecessors...
Again and again in The Brethren, blatant ploys or power plays by individual Justices are thwarted by the court as a whole. A poorly reasoned opinion by one Justice is hammered into something coherent and justifiable by others. During the Watergate crisis, when Burger took the court's decision on the Nixon tapes case for himself and botched it, the other Justices conspired to wrest the actual writing of the opinion away from the chief and inserted their own judgments into the final draft. True, Stewart scoffed that the final product had been edited from...