Word: harlan
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...recent years, students of the U.S. Supreme Court would leaf through new decisions in hopes of finding an opinion written by Hugo Black or John Harlan. Their extraordinary capacity to clarify and make vivid the issues in a case made their judgments preferred reading to serious scholars of the inexact science that is law. Because they often disagreed, there inevitably were cherished occasions when the two met head to head, as the writers of the major contending opinions. Black-more frequently in the majority-would crisply muster the facts and reasoning that led to the court's ruling...
Centrist Judges. Harlan, who was hospitalized last August with a spinal cancer, was the court's most skilled craftsman. More closely attuned to Nixon's legal philosophy than Black, Harlan was a judicial conservative whose lucid opinions rested on scholarship and a devotion to precedent-even to the point of often discarding his own previous positions once a majority of his colleagues had rejected his argument. "He kept the court honest by insisting on acid analysis and intense self-reflection," notes Stanford Law Professor Anthony Amsterdam. "His genius was in his sense of the proper decision-making processes...
...Princeton-educated son of a Chicago lawyer-politician and grandson of a Supreme Court Justice of the same name, Harlan opposed the Warren Court's decisions calling for reapportionment of legislatures in pursuit of a one-man, one-vote principle and the Miranda ruling throwing out confessions from criminal suspects not advised of their right to counsel. An advocate of judicial restraint, he objected to intervention by federal courts in state obscenity cases unless the state action was "clearly the product of prudish over-zealousness." In a recent capital-punishment decision-the court's most emotional pending issue...
Positive Gain. That is not the case in naming a successor to Black. Like Harlan, Black was a jurist who maintained that personal philosophy had no place in any judicial reckoning; yet he managed to read the same documents as Harlan and find different meanings in them. He was a passionate, literal exponent of free speech and a free press. He led the court into expanding the application of the Bill of Rights to cover state as well as federal actions. As the court was attacked for asserting the rights of criminal suspects or banning prayer in schools, Black would...
...Nixon court apparently will thus line up with Burger, Blackmun and the two new appointees in an almost automatically conservative group on which Nixon can count; Douglas and Marshall will be isolated on the left, frequently joined by Brennan; Stewart and White will be in the center, devoid of Harlan's influence and even more unpredictable than before...