Word: law
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Chief Justice Burger, nothing is likely to erase the dramatic record written between 1953 and 1969. Not since the days of John Marshall, whose term as Chief Justice ran more than twice as long as Warren's (1801-35), have the Justices broken more new ground in the law. Serving as they did during a period of the greatest social upheaval in the U.S. since the Civil War and the Depression, the Justices refused to label many issues "moot" or "unripe," or to invoke any of the other legal techniques that would have enabled them to avoid controversy...
...result was what New York University Law Professor Norman Dorsen calls "a fundamental reorientation of the court's role." The Warren court, says Dorsen, "moved dramatically from deference to the prerogatives of the other two branches of the Federal Government and of the states to aggressive protection of the rights of the individual." Leon Friedman, co-editor of a forthcoming history entitled The Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1789-1969, describes the change in another way: "The magic thing that the court has done is to have initiated a new moral sense in the country, a direction that...
...established that federal courts may intervene to protect the rights of a voter if state legislators do not act to correct malapportionment in voting districts. Proclaiming that for one man's vote to carry more weight than another's is a denial of equal protection of the law, the court ruled in subsequent cases that voting districts of unequal population were illegal for Congress (Wesberry v. Sanders, 1964), and for legislative bodies in the states (Reynolds v. Sims, 1964), and in local government (Avery v. Midland County, 1968) as well...
...Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which declared that a man accused of a felony has a right to free counsel if he cannot afford a lawyer. Gideon was not the first of the court's landmark decisions in criminal law. Mapp v. Ohio (1961) had announced the important principle that evidence seized in an illegal search may not be introduced at a man's trial. But Gideon was the first sign of the court's concern for protecting accused criminals who may not be able to defend themselves. It was followed by Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), which held...
...that Burger and Justices of similar temperament will in the future give the police the benefit of the doubt in resolving close cases based on Miranda. But like other Justices, Burger will be deterred by the doctrine of stare decisis (respect for precedent) from abandoning rules that have been law for three years now. Even so, under Burger's leadership, the court is more likely to return to the role of anchoring the ship of state than to try steering it into new waters...