Word: court
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nowhere has that legacy been more apparent than in the makeup of the current U.S. Supreme Court. Three of its nine members -- Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy -- were appointed by Reagan. William Rehnquist, a Nixon appointee, was promoted to Chief Justice by Reagan. Often allying themselves with Byron White, they have anchored a conservative majority that seems increasingly bent on undoing much of the work of its liberal predecessors...
Last week, in two major civil rights decisions, the Supreme Court demonstrated its rightward drift. In an anxiously watched North Carolina case, the high bench unanimously reaffirmed a 13-year-old precedent prohibiting racial discrimination in making and enforcing private contracts. But by a vote of 5 to 4 -- with all Reagan appointees in the majority -- the Justices refused to extend the ruling to cover racial harassment in the workplace. Just three days earlier, in a case involving Birmingham fire fighters, the same five significantly lowered the barriers protecting court-approved affirmative- action programs from challenges by white workers...
...rightward shift on civil rights began to quicken in January, when the Justices ruled 6 to 3 that affirmative-action programs may be approved only after the strictest judicial scrutiny. The pattern became clearer two weeks ago when, by the now familiar 5-to-4 vote, the court gave large companies accused of discrimination a crucial procedural win. The Justices held that, contrary to previous doctrine, it is employees who must prove that imbalances in the racial makeup of their employer's work force result from practices that have no valid business justification. That ruling provoked a biting dissent from...
...claimed that she had been asked to do menial tasks because she was black. Speaking for the majority, Kennedy said the statute prohibited "the refusal to enter into a contract" based on race, but not discrimination involving "postformation conduct" under a contract. Sniped dissenting Justice William Brennan: "What the court declines to snatch away with one hand, it takes with the other...
Most observers believe the court's turn to the right has been accelerated by the arrival of Justice Kennedy, the latest Reagan addition to the court, who is serving his first full term. Kennedy replaced Lewis Powell, a moderate conservative on race questions, after the collapse of the nominations of Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg. "The civil rights community mounted this great offensive against Robert Bork," says Walter Burns of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Now they're getting what they feared, without him on the court...