Word: williams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Justice William Rehnquist, who also concurred, would go much further: defendants, prosecutors and judges should be free to bar press and public from any trial for any reason they choose. Staking out the hardest-line position of all, he declared that the public has absolutely no right to attend any criminal proceedings. A trial court, Rehnquist added, "is not required by the Sixth Amendment to advance any reason whatsoever for declining to open a pretrial hearing to the public." He specifically rejected the notion that the First Amendment is "some kind of constitutional 'sunshine...
What worried the four dissenters was the likelihood that some lower-court judges will take Rehnquist at his word and begin closing off courtrooms for no good reason. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for himself and Justices William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and Byron White, accused the court of overreacting to the risks of prejudicial publicity in the Clapp murder case. News articles about the case were "placid, routine and innocuous," wrote Blackmun. "There was no screaming headline, no lurid photograph, no front-page overemphasis." Nonetheless, the court "reached for a strict and flat result," he said, an "inflexible rule" that ignores...
When Richard Nixon appointed four Supreme Court Justices between 1969 and 1973-Chief Justice Warren Burger and Associate Justices Harry Blackmun, William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell-the President fully expected them to halt, if not reverse, the steady expansion of individual rights that had begun under the activist Warren Court. So did many court watchers. But it has not quite turned out that...
...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 in several key cases this year, and he wrote the majority opinion in the Weber case. That is an indication, says Stanford Law Professor Gerald Gunther, of a less conservative tilt...
...American press is better than ever. Yellow journalism persists, but largely on the fringes of the press and is pale compared with what it was in the heyday of William RandolphHearst. One episode: Drumming the U.S. to war against Spain, Hearst sent " Artist Frederic Remington to Cuba. When Remington cabled that all was quiet, with no war in sight, Hearst fired back: "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." Arrogance of such magnitude is unheard of today. The sensationalist Joseph Pulitzer declared that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but the fact...