Word: courtly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Women's Rights. Unemployed female heads of household won the right to be paid welfare benefits, like men; divorced women can now also be made to pay alimony, like men. But the court would not go as far as the women's rights movement wants it to, and treat sex discrimination just like racial discrimination. In one important case, Massachusetts vs. Feeney, the Justices rejected the argument that veterans preference laws discriminate against women because 98% of all veterans in Massachusetts are men. The court reasoned that the laws were not meant to hurt women, but to help...
Crime. If the Burger Court had been the law-and-order court Nixon hoped it would be, it would have overturned earlier decisions giving broad effect to the Fourth Amendment prohibition against "unreasonable searches and seizures." But this year the court upheld Fourth Amendment claims more often than not. In Arkansas vs. Sanders, for instance, the court ruled that police with probable cause needed a warrant to search a suitcase found in a car. In Delaware vs. Prouse, the court struck down random police checks of drivers' licenses and car registrations. On the other hand, it found no Fourth...
...court's uncertain course depends largely on how five moderate Justices-Potter Stewart, John Paul Stevens, Byron White, Blackmun and Powell -cast their votes. They are known as the "fluid five" or the "floating center." Explains University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone: "The Justices in the middle are not 'principle' Justices, which is not to say they are unprincipled -just unpredictable." The only real ideologues on the high bench are Rehnquist on the right and William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall on the left. Brennan, often a dissenter in the past, found himself in the majority...
...year was made livelier by what went on outside the court's marble temple. In April an ABC-TV reporter, Tim O'Brien, leaked the results of some yet-to-be-released high court decisions. The court immediately clamped down on security, limiting the hours when reporters could use the press room in the Supreme Court building and for a few weeks posting a police officer near the room. Then in May, Justice Marshall publicly lashed out at his colleagues for being insensitive to criminal defendants. Marshall, who is reported to be increasingly disaffected from the court, surprised...
Such public pique is very rare among Supreme Court Justices. The court is an intensely private place that prizes its secrecy. Differences between the Justices more often show up only in their judicial opinions-and in this court's overall lack of coherence...