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On September 30, 1953, Earl Warren was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. From the article:
"Earl Warren (March 19, 1891 – July 9, 1974) was an American jurist and politician who served as the 30th Governor of California (1943–1953) and later the 14th Chief Justice of the United States (1953–1969).
He is best known for the liberal decisions of the Warren Court, which outlawed segregation in public schools and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending public school-sponsored prayers, and requiring "one man–one vote" rules of apportionment of election districts. He made the Supreme Court a power center on a more even basis with Congress and the Presidency, especially through four landmark decisions: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).
He is also controversial for his involvement in the direction of the compulsory removal of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent from the West Coast to inland concentration camps, without any charges or due process, and with the eugenics, forced-sterilizations, and ethnic cleansing policies he enacted as Attorney General.
Warren is the only person elected to three consecutive terms as Governor of California, and with those three elected terms he is second only to Jerry Brown for total gubernatorial wins in California. Before holding these positions, he was the District Attorney for Alameda County, California, and the Attorney General of California.
Warren was the nominee of the Republican Party for Vice President in 1948, as the running mate of Thomas E. Dewey. He was appointed to chair what became known as the Warren Commission, which was formed to investigate the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Education, early career, and military service
Earl Warren was born in Los Angeles, on March 19, 1891, to Mathias H. Warren, a Norwegian immigrant whose original family name was Varren,[1] and his wife, Crystal (Hernlund), a Swedish immigrant. Mathias Warren was a longtime employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad. While thought to have a middle name, Warren was not given one at birth because his parents "couldn't afford the luxury" for one.[2] After Mathias was blacklisted for joining in a strike, the family moved to Bakersfield, California, in 1894. Matthias worked in a railroad repair yard, and Earl had summer jobs in railroading.
Earl Warren grew up in Bakersfield, California where he attended Washington Junior High and Kern County High School (now called Bakersfield High School). His father was murdered there by an unknown person during a robbery.
In 1912 Warren graduated with a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.[3] In 1914 he earned his J.D. at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). He was a member of The Gun Club secret society,[4] and the Sigma Phi Society, a fraternity with which he maintained lifelong ties. As an undergraduate, Warren also played clarinet in the Cal Band that was not that well known.[5]
Warren maintained a lifelong friendship with fellow Cal student Robert Gordon Sproul, who later became president of University of California. In 1948, at the Republican National Convention, Sproul would nominate Warren for vice president.
Warren was admitted to the California bar in 1914. Warren worked a year for Associated Oil Company in San Francisco, then joined Robinson & Robinson, a law firm in Oakland.
After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Warren volunteered for an officer training camp but was rejected due to his hemorrhoids. As a result of contracting ether pneumonia after an operation to remove the hemorrhoids, he spent several weeks in the hospital, by which time the training camp had closed. Warren enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in August, and was assigned to Company I of the 91st Division's 363rd Infantry Regiment at Camp Lewis, Washington. He was made acting first sergeant of the company and graduated from a three-month officer training course that began in January 1918. After he returned to the company in May as a Second Lieutenant, the regiment was sent to Camp Lee, Virginia, to train draftees. Warren spent the rest of the war there and was discharged less than a month after Armistice Day, following a promotion to First Lieutenant.[6]...
U.S. Supreme Court Edit
Chief Justice Earl Warren
Appointed to Supreme Court Edit
At the 1952 Republican National Convention, Warren stood as a California "favorite son" candidate for the Presidential nomination, hoping to be a power broker in a convention that might be deadlocked. Warren was stymied, however, when former Whittier congressman and then Senator Richard Nixon, who had previously publicly promised Warren his support, furtively undermined Warren and switched his support to General Dwight D. Eisenhower when offered the vice-presidency.[26] Eisenhower and Nixon were elected in the United States presidential election, 1952, and the bad blood between Warren and Nixon was apparent. Warren referred to Nixon as "a crook and a thief" and carried his hatred of the man to his deathbed,[26] dying one month before Nixon's resignation. President Eisenhower offered, and Warren accepted, the office of Solicitor General of the United States, with the promise of a seat on the Supreme Court. But before it was announced, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died suddenly in September 1953 and Eisenhower picked Warren to replace him as Chief Justice of the United States.[27][28] The choice was strongly supported by Nixon, who allegedly wanted to remove Warren from California politics by shelving him into the Supreme Court.[29]
The president wanted what he felt was an experienced jurist who could appeal to liberals in the party as well as law-and-order conservatives, noting privately that Warren "represents the kind of political, economic, and social thinking that I believe we need on the Supreme Court.... He has a national name for integrity, uprightness, and courage that, again, I believe we need on the Court".[30] In the next few years, Warren led the Court in a series of liberal decisions that revolutionized the role of the Court. Some writers believe that Eisenhower once remarked that his appointment was "the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made".[31][32] However, Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith concluded in 2012 that "Eisenhower never said that. I have no evidence that he ever made such a statement."[33] Eisenhower gave Warren a recess appointment that began on October 1, 1953. It was made permanent when the Senate acted on March 1, 1954. No serious opposition had appeared and he was confirmed by unanimous voice vote.[34]
Warren is the last Supreme Court justice to have served as governor of a U.S. state, the last justice to have been elected to statewide elected office, and the last serving politician to be elevated to the Supreme Court.
As Chief Justice, Warren swore in the president in the second inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957 and his successor John F. Kennedy in 1961. Warren did not swear Lyndon B. Johnson when he first became president on the death of Kennedy in 1963, but did swear in Johnson in 1965. Four years later he swore in Richard Nixon in 1969.
The Warren Court Edit
President Kennedy and Chief Justice Earl Warren with their wives, November 1963
Main article: Warren Court
Despite his lack of judicial experience, his years in the Alameda County district attorney's office and as state attorney general gave him far more knowledge of the law in practice than most other members of the Court. He was an effective and persuasive leader, more politically astute than most judicial leaders. Over the years he was effective in forging majorities in support of major decisions, and inspiring liberal forces around the nation.
Initially Warren realized his lack of judicial experience and asked the senior associate justice, Hugo L. Black, to preside over conferences until he became accustomed to the processes. However, Warren learned quickly and soon was in fact, as well as in name, the Court's chief justice.[35]
When he was appointed, all other justices had been appointed by Democrats, Franklin D. Roosevelt or Truman, and all were committed New Deal liberals. But they disagreed about the role that the courts should play in achieving liberal goals. The Court was split between two warring factions. Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson led one faction, which insisted upon judicial self-restraint and insisted courts should defer to the policymaking prerogatives of the White House and Congress. Hugo Black and William O. Douglas led the opposing faction; they agreed the court should defer to Congress in matters of economic policy, but felt the judicial agenda had been transformed from questions of property rights to those of individual liberties, and in this area, courts should play a more activist role. Warren's belief that the judiciary must seek to do justice placed him with the activists, although he did not have a solid majority until after Frankfurter's retirement in 1962.[36]
Constitutional historian Melvin I. Urofsky concludes that "Scholars agree that as a judge, Warren does not rank with Louis Brandeis, Black, or Brennan in terms of jurisprudence. His opinions were not always clearly written, and his legal logic was often muddled."[37][38][39] His strength lay in his public gravitas, his leadership skills and in his firm belief that the Constitution guaranteed natural rights and that the Court had a unique role in protecting those rights.[40][41]
Political conservatives attacked his rulings as inappropriate and have called for courts to be deferential to the elected political branches. Some political liberals agreed that the court went too far in some areas[42][43] but insist that most of its controversial decisions struck a responsive chord in the nation and have become firmly established law.[44]
Decisions
Warren was a more liberal justice than anyone had anticipated.[45] Warren was able to craft a long series of landmark decisions because he built a winning coalition. When Frankfurter retired in 1962 and President John F. Kennedy named labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg to replace him, Warren finally had the fifth liberal vote for his majority. William J. Brennan Jr., a liberal Democrat appointed by Eisenhower in 1956, was the intellectual leader of the activist faction that included Black and Douglas. Brennan complemented Warren's political skills with the strong legal skills Warren lacked and Warren would often have Brennan edit his opinions before they were circulated.[26] Warren and Brennan met before the regular conferences to plan out their strategy.[46] Warren actively sought out lower court cases to overrule precedent, directing his clerks to "keep your eyes peeled for a right to counsel case" as early as 1961.[26]
Brown (1954)
Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954) banned the segregation of public schools. The very first case put Warren's leadership skills to an extraordinary test. The NAACP had been waging a systematic legal fight against the "separate but equal" doctrine enunciated in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and finally had challenged Plessy in a series of five related cases, which had been argued before the Court in the spring of 1953. However the justices had been unable to decide the issue and ordered a reargument of the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools by the states for whites and blacks.[47]
While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the self-restraint faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the Court the power to order its end, especially since the Court, in several cases decided after Plessy, had upheld the doctrine of "separate but equal" as constitutional.[48] The activist faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment did give the necessary authority and were pushing to go ahead. Warren, who held only a recess appointment, held his tongue until the Senate, dominated by southerners, confirmed his appointment. Warren told his colleagues after oral argument that he believed racial segregation violated the Constitution and that only if one considered African Americans inferior to whites could the practice be upheld. But he did not push for a vote. Instead, he talked with the justices and encouraged them to talk with each other as he sought a common ground on which all could stand. Finally he had eight votes, and the last holdout, Stanley Reed of Kentucky, agreed to join the rest. Warren drafted the basic opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and kept circulating and revising it until he had an opinion endorsed by all the members of the Court.[49]
The unanimity Warren achieved helped speed the drive to desegregate public schools, which mostly came about under President Richard Nixon. Throughout his years as Chief, Warren succeeded in keeping all decisions concerning segregation unanimous. Brown applied to schools, but soon the Court enlarged the concept to other state actions, striking down racial classification in many areas. Congress ratified the process in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Warren did compromise by agreeing to Frankfurter's demand that the Court go slowly in implementing desegregation; Warren used Frankfurter's suggestion that a 1955 decision (Brown II) include the phrase "all deliberate speed".[50]
The Brown decision of 1954 marked, in dramatic fashion, the radical shift in the Court's—and the nation's—priorities from issues of property rights to civil liberties. Under Warren the courts became an active partner in governing the nation. Warren never saw the courts as a backward-looking branch of government.
The Brown decision was a powerful moral statement clad in a weak constitutional analysis; Warren was never a legal scholar on a par with Frankfurter or a great advocate of particular doctrines, as was Black. Instead, he believed that in all branches of government common sense, decency, and elemental justice were decisive, not precedent (stare decisis), tradition or the text of the Constitution. He wanted results. He never felt that doctrine alone should be allowed to deprive people of justice. He felt racial segregation was simply wrong, and Brown, whatever its doctrinal defects, remains a landmark decision primarily because of Warren's interpretation of the equal protection clause to mean that children should not be shunted to a separate world reserved for minorities.[51]
Reapportionment
The "one man, one vote" cases (Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims) of 1962–1964 had the effect of ending the sometimes gross malapportionment of state legislative chambers, to the political detriment of those who lived in more densely populated areas.
Warren's priority on fairness shaped other major decisions. In 1962, over the strong objections of Frankfurter, the Court agreed that questions regarding malapportionment in state legislatures were not political issues, and thus were not outside the Court's purview. For years, underpopulated rural areas had an equal voice in the state legislatures in the Senate where Los Angeles County had only one state senator just like Siskiyou County. Cities had long since passed their peak, and now it was the middle class suburbs that were underrepresented. Frankfurter insisted that the Court should avoid this "political thicket" and warned that the Court would never be able to find a clear formula to guide lower courts in the rash of lawsuits sure to follow. But Douglas found such a formula: "one man, one vote."[52]
In the key apportionment case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964),[53] Warren delivered a civics lesson: "To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen," Warren declared. "The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause." Unlike the desegregation cases, in this instance, the Court ordered immediate action, and despite loud outcries from rural legislators, Congress failed to reach the two-thirds needed to pass a constitutional amendment. The states complied, reapportioned their legislatures quickly and with minimal troubles. Numerous commentators have concluded reapportionment was the Warren Court's great "success" story.[54]
Due process and rights of defendants (1963–66)
In Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963) the Court held that the Sixth Amendment required that all indigent criminal defendants receive publicly funded counsel (Florida law, consistent with then-existing Supreme Court precedent reflected in the case of Powell v. Alabama, required the assignment of free counsel to indigent defendants only in capital cases); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966) required that certain rights of a person interrogated while in police custody be clearly explained, including the right to an attorney (often called the "Miranda warning").
While most Americans eventually agreed that the Court's desegregation and apportionment decisions were fair and right, disagreement about the "due process revolution" continues into the 21st century. Warren took the lead in criminal justice; despite his years as a tough prosecutor, he always insisted that the police must play fair or the accused should go free. Warren was privately outraged at what he considered police abuses that ranged from warrantless searches to forced confessions.
Warren's Court ordered lawyers for indigent defendants in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), and prevented prosecutors from using evidence seized in illegal searches, in Mapp v. Ohio (1961). The famous case of Miranda v. Arizona (1966) summed up Warren's philosophy.[55] Everyone, even ones accused of crimes, still enjoyed constitutionally protected rights, and the police had to respect those rights and issue a specific warning when making an arrest. Warren did not believe in coddling criminals; thus in Terry v. Ohio (1968) he gave police officers leeway to stop and frisk those they had reason to believe held weapons.
Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police."[56] They attacked Warren using official FBI statistics that showed violent crime and homicide rates shooting up nationwide; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.[57]
First Amendment
The Warren Court's activism stretched into a new turf, especially First Amendment rights. The Court's decision outlawing mandatory school prayer in Engel v. Vitale (1962) brought vehement complaints that continue to the present.[58] Warren worked to nationalize the Bill of Rights by applying it to the states. Moreover, in one of the landmark cases decided by the Court, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Warren Court announced a constitutionally protected right of privacy.[59] With the exception of the desegregation decisions, few decisions were unanimous. The eminent scholar Justice John Marshall Harlan II took Frankfurter's place as the Court's self-constraint spokesman, often joined by Potter Stewart and Byron R. White. But with the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice, and Abe Fortas (replacing Goldberg), Warren could count on six votes in most cases.[60]"
"Earl Warren (March 19, 1891 – July 9, 1974) was an American jurist and politician who served as the 30th Governor of California (1943–1953) and later the 14th Chief Justice of the United States (1953–1969).
He is best known for the liberal decisions of the Warren Court, which outlawed segregation in public schools and transformed many areas of American law, especially regarding the rights of the accused, ending public school-sponsored prayers, and requiring "one man–one vote" rules of apportionment of election districts. He made the Supreme Court a power center on a more even basis with Congress and the Presidency, especially through four landmark decisions: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Reynolds v. Sims (1964), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).
He is also controversial for his involvement in the direction of the compulsory removal of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent from the West Coast to inland concentration camps, without any charges or due process, and with the eugenics, forced-sterilizations, and ethnic cleansing policies he enacted as Attorney General.
Warren is the only person elected to three consecutive terms as Governor of California, and with those three elected terms he is second only to Jerry Brown for total gubernatorial wins in California. Before holding these positions, he was the District Attorney for Alameda County, California, and the Attorney General of California.
Warren was the nominee of the Republican Party for Vice President in 1948, as the running mate of Thomas E. Dewey. He was appointed to chair what became known as the Warren Commission, which was formed to investigate the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Education, early career, and military service
Earl Warren was born in Los Angeles, on March 19, 1891, to Mathias H. Warren, a Norwegian immigrant whose original family name was Varren,[1] and his wife, Crystal (Hernlund), a Swedish immigrant. Mathias Warren was a longtime employee of the Southern Pacific Railroad. While thought to have a middle name, Warren was not given one at birth because his parents "couldn't afford the luxury" for one.[2] After Mathias was blacklisted for joining in a strike, the family moved to Bakersfield, California, in 1894. Matthias worked in a railroad repair yard, and Earl had summer jobs in railroading.
Earl Warren grew up in Bakersfield, California where he attended Washington Junior High and Kern County High School (now called Bakersfield High School). His father was murdered there by an unknown person during a robbery.
In 1912 Warren graduated with a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley.[3] In 1914 he earned his J.D. at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). He was a member of The Gun Club secret society,[4] and the Sigma Phi Society, a fraternity with which he maintained lifelong ties. As an undergraduate, Warren also played clarinet in the Cal Band that was not that well known.[5]
Warren maintained a lifelong friendship with fellow Cal student Robert Gordon Sproul, who later became president of University of California. In 1948, at the Republican National Convention, Sproul would nominate Warren for vice president.
Warren was admitted to the California bar in 1914. Warren worked a year for Associated Oil Company in San Francisco, then joined Robinson & Robinson, a law firm in Oakland.
After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Warren volunteered for an officer training camp but was rejected due to his hemorrhoids. As a result of contracting ether pneumonia after an operation to remove the hemorrhoids, he spent several weeks in the hospital, by which time the training camp had closed. Warren enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in August, and was assigned to Company I of the 91st Division's 363rd Infantry Regiment at Camp Lewis, Washington. He was made acting first sergeant of the company and graduated from a three-month officer training course that began in January 1918. After he returned to the company in May as a Second Lieutenant, the regiment was sent to Camp Lee, Virginia, to train draftees. Warren spent the rest of the war there and was discharged less than a month after Armistice Day, following a promotion to First Lieutenant.[6]...
U.S. Supreme Court Edit
Chief Justice Earl Warren
Appointed to Supreme Court Edit
At the 1952 Republican National Convention, Warren stood as a California "favorite son" candidate for the Presidential nomination, hoping to be a power broker in a convention that might be deadlocked. Warren was stymied, however, when former Whittier congressman and then Senator Richard Nixon, who had previously publicly promised Warren his support, furtively undermined Warren and switched his support to General Dwight D. Eisenhower when offered the vice-presidency.[26] Eisenhower and Nixon were elected in the United States presidential election, 1952, and the bad blood between Warren and Nixon was apparent. Warren referred to Nixon as "a crook and a thief" and carried his hatred of the man to his deathbed,[26] dying one month before Nixon's resignation. President Eisenhower offered, and Warren accepted, the office of Solicitor General of the United States, with the promise of a seat on the Supreme Court. But before it was announced, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died suddenly in September 1953 and Eisenhower picked Warren to replace him as Chief Justice of the United States.[27][28] The choice was strongly supported by Nixon, who allegedly wanted to remove Warren from California politics by shelving him into the Supreme Court.[29]
The president wanted what he felt was an experienced jurist who could appeal to liberals in the party as well as law-and-order conservatives, noting privately that Warren "represents the kind of political, economic, and social thinking that I believe we need on the Supreme Court.... He has a national name for integrity, uprightness, and courage that, again, I believe we need on the Court".[30] In the next few years, Warren led the Court in a series of liberal decisions that revolutionized the role of the Court. Some writers believe that Eisenhower once remarked that his appointment was "the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made".[31][32] However, Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith concluded in 2012 that "Eisenhower never said that. I have no evidence that he ever made such a statement."[33] Eisenhower gave Warren a recess appointment that began on October 1, 1953. It was made permanent when the Senate acted on March 1, 1954. No serious opposition had appeared and he was confirmed by unanimous voice vote.[34]
Warren is the last Supreme Court justice to have served as governor of a U.S. state, the last justice to have been elected to statewide elected office, and the last serving politician to be elevated to the Supreme Court.
As Chief Justice, Warren swore in the president in the second inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957 and his successor John F. Kennedy in 1961. Warren did not swear Lyndon B. Johnson when he first became president on the death of Kennedy in 1963, but did swear in Johnson in 1965. Four years later he swore in Richard Nixon in 1969.
The Warren Court Edit
President Kennedy and Chief Justice Earl Warren with their wives, November 1963
Main article: Warren Court
Despite his lack of judicial experience, his years in the Alameda County district attorney's office and as state attorney general gave him far more knowledge of the law in practice than most other members of the Court. He was an effective and persuasive leader, more politically astute than most judicial leaders. Over the years he was effective in forging majorities in support of major decisions, and inspiring liberal forces around the nation.
Initially Warren realized his lack of judicial experience and asked the senior associate justice, Hugo L. Black, to preside over conferences until he became accustomed to the processes. However, Warren learned quickly and soon was in fact, as well as in name, the Court's chief justice.[35]
When he was appointed, all other justices had been appointed by Democrats, Franklin D. Roosevelt or Truman, and all were committed New Deal liberals. But they disagreed about the role that the courts should play in achieving liberal goals. The Court was split between two warring factions. Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson led one faction, which insisted upon judicial self-restraint and insisted courts should defer to the policymaking prerogatives of the White House and Congress. Hugo Black and William O. Douglas led the opposing faction; they agreed the court should defer to Congress in matters of economic policy, but felt the judicial agenda had been transformed from questions of property rights to those of individual liberties, and in this area, courts should play a more activist role. Warren's belief that the judiciary must seek to do justice placed him with the activists, although he did not have a solid majority until after Frankfurter's retirement in 1962.[36]
Constitutional historian Melvin I. Urofsky concludes that "Scholars agree that as a judge, Warren does not rank with Louis Brandeis, Black, or Brennan in terms of jurisprudence. His opinions were not always clearly written, and his legal logic was often muddled."[37][38][39] His strength lay in his public gravitas, his leadership skills and in his firm belief that the Constitution guaranteed natural rights and that the Court had a unique role in protecting those rights.[40][41]
Political conservatives attacked his rulings as inappropriate and have called for courts to be deferential to the elected political branches. Some political liberals agreed that the court went too far in some areas[42][43] but insist that most of its controversial decisions struck a responsive chord in the nation and have become firmly established law.[44]
Decisions
Warren was a more liberal justice than anyone had anticipated.[45] Warren was able to craft a long series of landmark decisions because he built a winning coalition. When Frankfurter retired in 1962 and President John F. Kennedy named labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg to replace him, Warren finally had the fifth liberal vote for his majority. William J. Brennan Jr., a liberal Democrat appointed by Eisenhower in 1956, was the intellectual leader of the activist faction that included Black and Douglas. Brennan complemented Warren's political skills with the strong legal skills Warren lacked and Warren would often have Brennan edit his opinions before they were circulated.[26] Warren and Brennan met before the regular conferences to plan out their strategy.[46] Warren actively sought out lower court cases to overrule precedent, directing his clerks to "keep your eyes peeled for a right to counsel case" as early as 1961.[26]
Brown (1954)
Brown v. Board of Education 347 U.S. 483 (1954) banned the segregation of public schools. The very first case put Warren's leadership skills to an extraordinary test. The NAACP had been waging a systematic legal fight against the "separate but equal" doctrine enunciated in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and finally had challenged Plessy in a series of five related cases, which had been argued before the Court in the spring of 1953. However the justices had been unable to decide the issue and ordered a reargument of the case in fall 1953, with special attention to whether the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause prohibited the operation of separate public schools by the states for whites and blacks.[47]
While all but one justice personally rejected segregation, the self-restraint faction questioned whether the Constitution gave the Court the power to order its end, especially since the Court, in several cases decided after Plessy, had upheld the doctrine of "separate but equal" as constitutional.[48] The activist faction believed the Fourteenth Amendment did give the necessary authority and were pushing to go ahead. Warren, who held only a recess appointment, held his tongue until the Senate, dominated by southerners, confirmed his appointment. Warren told his colleagues after oral argument that he believed racial segregation violated the Constitution and that only if one considered African Americans inferior to whites could the practice be upheld. But he did not push for a vote. Instead, he talked with the justices and encouraged them to talk with each other as he sought a common ground on which all could stand. Finally he had eight votes, and the last holdout, Stanley Reed of Kentucky, agreed to join the rest. Warren drafted the basic opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and kept circulating and revising it until he had an opinion endorsed by all the members of the Court.[49]
The unanimity Warren achieved helped speed the drive to desegregate public schools, which mostly came about under President Richard Nixon. Throughout his years as Chief, Warren succeeded in keeping all decisions concerning segregation unanimous. Brown applied to schools, but soon the Court enlarged the concept to other state actions, striking down racial classification in many areas. Congress ratified the process in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Warren did compromise by agreeing to Frankfurter's demand that the Court go slowly in implementing desegregation; Warren used Frankfurter's suggestion that a 1955 decision (Brown II) include the phrase "all deliberate speed".[50]
The Brown decision of 1954 marked, in dramatic fashion, the radical shift in the Court's—and the nation's—priorities from issues of property rights to civil liberties. Under Warren the courts became an active partner in governing the nation. Warren never saw the courts as a backward-looking branch of government.
The Brown decision was a powerful moral statement clad in a weak constitutional analysis; Warren was never a legal scholar on a par with Frankfurter or a great advocate of particular doctrines, as was Black. Instead, he believed that in all branches of government common sense, decency, and elemental justice were decisive, not precedent (stare decisis), tradition or the text of the Constitution. He wanted results. He never felt that doctrine alone should be allowed to deprive people of justice. He felt racial segregation was simply wrong, and Brown, whatever its doctrinal defects, remains a landmark decision primarily because of Warren's interpretation of the equal protection clause to mean that children should not be shunted to a separate world reserved for minorities.[51]
Reapportionment
The "one man, one vote" cases (Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims) of 1962–1964 had the effect of ending the sometimes gross malapportionment of state legislative chambers, to the political detriment of those who lived in more densely populated areas.
Warren's priority on fairness shaped other major decisions. In 1962, over the strong objections of Frankfurter, the Court agreed that questions regarding malapportionment in state legislatures were not political issues, and thus were not outside the Court's purview. For years, underpopulated rural areas had an equal voice in the state legislatures in the Senate where Los Angeles County had only one state senator just like Siskiyou County. Cities had long since passed their peak, and now it was the middle class suburbs that were underrepresented. Frankfurter insisted that the Court should avoid this "political thicket" and warned that the Court would never be able to find a clear formula to guide lower courts in the rash of lawsuits sure to follow. But Douglas found such a formula: "one man, one vote."[52]
In the key apportionment case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964),[53] Warren delivered a civics lesson: "To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen," Warren declared. "The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause." Unlike the desegregation cases, in this instance, the Court ordered immediate action, and despite loud outcries from rural legislators, Congress failed to reach the two-thirds needed to pass a constitutional amendment. The states complied, reapportioned their legislatures quickly and with minimal troubles. Numerous commentators have concluded reapportionment was the Warren Court's great "success" story.[54]
Due process and rights of defendants (1963–66)
In Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963) the Court held that the Sixth Amendment required that all indigent criminal defendants receive publicly funded counsel (Florida law, consistent with then-existing Supreme Court precedent reflected in the case of Powell v. Alabama, required the assignment of free counsel to indigent defendants only in capital cases); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966) required that certain rights of a person interrogated while in police custody be clearly explained, including the right to an attorney (often called the "Miranda warning").
While most Americans eventually agreed that the Court's desegregation and apportionment decisions were fair and right, disagreement about the "due process revolution" continues into the 21st century. Warren took the lead in criminal justice; despite his years as a tough prosecutor, he always insisted that the police must play fair or the accused should go free. Warren was privately outraged at what he considered police abuses that ranged from warrantless searches to forced confessions.
Warren's Court ordered lawyers for indigent defendants in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), and prevented prosecutors from using evidence seized in illegal searches, in Mapp v. Ohio (1961). The famous case of Miranda v. Arizona (1966) summed up Warren's philosophy.[55] Everyone, even ones accused of crimes, still enjoyed constitutionally protected rights, and the police had to respect those rights and issue a specific warning when making an arrest. Warren did not believe in coddling criminals; thus in Terry v. Ohio (1968) he gave police officers leeway to stop and frisk those they had reason to believe held weapons.
Conservatives angrily denounced the "handcuffing of the police."[56] They attacked Warren using official FBI statistics that showed violent crime and homicide rates shooting up nationwide; in New York City, for example, after steady to declining trends until the early 1960s, the homicide rate doubled in the period from 1964 to 1974 from just under 5 per 100,000 at the beginning of that period to just under 10 per 100,000 in 1974. After 1992 the homicide rates fell sharply.[57]
First Amendment
The Warren Court's activism stretched into a new turf, especially First Amendment rights. The Court's decision outlawing mandatory school prayer in Engel v. Vitale (1962) brought vehement complaints that continue to the present.[58] Warren worked to nationalize the Bill of Rights by applying it to the states. Moreover, in one of the landmark cases decided by the Court, Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Warren Court announced a constitutionally protected right of privacy.[59] With the exception of the desegregation decisions, few decisions were unanimous. The eminent scholar Justice John Marshall Harlan II took Frankfurter's place as the Court's self-constraint spokesman, often joined by Potter Stewart and Byron R. White. But with the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice, and Abe Fortas (replacing Goldberg), Warren could count on six votes in most cases.[60]"
Earl Warren - Wikipedia
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