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Is There a Burger Court?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Richard Hodder-Williams
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Extract

The history of the Supreme Court tends to be divided into historical slices coterminous with individual Chief Justiceships. One speaks of the Taft Court, the Hughes Court, the Stone Court, the Vinson Court, and the Warren Court. Behind these titles lies the implication that they can be differentiated in terms of something more than merely temporal variation; the Chief Justice himself must be the catalyst which is supposed to make each era special. But, in what senses can a period of Supreme Court history be thought of as specifically associated with its current Chief Justice?

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , April 1979 , pp. 173 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1979

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References

1 Jackson, Robert H., The Supreme Court in the American System of Government (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 55.Google Scholar

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5 Since the decision of the Court is the majority's decision, authoritative determination of the Constitution or Federal Law requires only five votes, except, of course, when there is not a full bench. Only in circumstances where the Court is divided 5–4 and one of the majority needs replacing will a single new appointment be immediately crucial. Perhaps the classic instance of new appointments radically altering the substance of the Court's output was President Grant's successful nomination of Joseph P. Bradley and William Strong in 1870. Early in 1870, by 5–3, the Court found the Legal Tender Act unconstitutional; a new appointment and an increase in the size of the Court authorized by Congress, enabled this reverse itself to be reversed 5–4 at the end of 1871. Hepburn v. Griswold, 8 Wall., 603 (1870)Google Scholar and Knox v. Lee, 12 Wall., 457 (1871).Google Scholar

6 Implicit in the discussion at this stage is the assumption that one can sensibly talk about the Warren Court as a shorthand for a single, coherent body of decisions. See below, p. 184.

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8 A splendid example of this is the opinion of William Douglas, the arch-activist in most people's books, for a unanimous court in Lassiter v. Northampton County Board of Elections, 360 US 45 (1959)Google Scholar, upholding a North Carolinian statute requiring electors of all races to be able to read and write any section of the state's constitution in English. ‘We do not sit in judgement on the wisdom of that policy’, he wrote, implying his doubts as to its wisdom.

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33 Coker v. Georgia, 433 US 584 (1977).Google Scholar See also the per curiam opinion confirming this principle (murdering on-duty policemen carried a mandatory death penalty) in Roberts v. Louisiana 431 US 633 (1977).Google Scholar

34 A narrowly divided Court decided in 1977 that severe beating in schools did not infringe the fundamental respect for humanity now written into the Constitution. Stewart joined the Nixon quartet. Ingraham v. Wright, 97 S.Ct. 1401 (1977).Google Scholar

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46 As is argued by Phil Davies in ‘Jimmy Carter and the Black Constituency: The First Year’ (unpublished paper presented to the American Politics Group of the PSA, Warwick 1978), pp. 2–3.

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70 It must remain a matter of judgement how far the output of the Warren Court was due to any one of Black, Douglas, Warren, Clark or Brennan. I am tempted to believe that Warren's espousal of constitutional developments owed as much to Black's leadership as to his own previous commitment; Warren was more open to influence than Burger, since his background had been deeply political and not judicial, thus isolating him to some extent from the sort of problems he had to deal with. In a very real sense, then, it is appropriate to think of the Warren Court as the ‘Black Court’ (Snowiss, Sylvia, ‘The Legacy of Justice Black’ in Kurland, Philip, ed., The Supreme Court Review 1973 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974), p. 251Google Scholar). The incorporation of virtually all of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment was very much Black's legacy so that Norman Dorsen's comment that ‘Hugo Black was a titan, an overarching figure who perhaps had a greater influence on constitutional development than any Supreme Court Justice save John Marshall’ may be an almost pardonable exaggeration (New York University Law Review, XLVI (1971), p. 649Google Scholar). But it still required someone like William Brennan or Earl Warren to put a majority together.

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77 Burger's addresses are published annually in the American Bar Association Journal.

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81 See the exchange of notes between Warren Burger and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Carl Albert, reprinted in Murphy, and Pritchett, , eds., Courts, Judges, Politics, pp. 273–5.Google Scholar Burger is not alone among Chief Justices to do this; see Murphy, , Elements of Judicial Strategy, Chap. 4.Google Scholar

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88 Roman Hruska, for instance, introduced legislation on 10 December 1975 to create a seven-man National Court of Appeals to hear cases that involved important and unresolved issues of federal law which the Supreme Court had not considered. Cases would come by referral from the Supreme Court itself or by transfer from the Federal Courts of Appeal.

89 Burger served as a Federal Judge on the Court of Appeals for Washington D.C. and has a considerable record by which his jurisprudence can be judged. Since the subject matter of litigation before the Washington Court is more akin to that encountered in the Supreme Court than in other Courts of Appeal, his record has particular relevance to his actions as Chief Justice. According to Lamb, Burger became more conservative the longer he was an Appeals Court judge, perhaps as a reaction to the elevation of David Bazelon to Chief Judge, between whom it was widely acknowledged little love was lost (Lamb, Charles M., ‘Exploring the Conservatism of Federal Appeal Court Judges’, Indiana Law Journal, LI (1975–1976), 257–69).Google Scholar

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92 Some academic observers (such as Miller, Arthur S., ‘Lord Chancellor Warren Earl Burger’, Society, X (03/04 1973), 18–27)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and some of the law clerks to whom I spoke in Washington in 1973 have been somewhat disparaging about his intellect. I was myself somewhat surprised to hear him credit Lord Bryce with de Tocqueville's celebrated observation that there is scarcely a matter which divides Americans that does not come to the courts for resolution.

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94 Mason, , Howard Taft.Google Scholar

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97 One of Justice John Paul Stevens's clerks suggested that this scheme was actually an added burden to the law clerks. The intimacy of chambers, he felt, made processing forty petitions for certiorari per fortnight less exhausting than processing fourteen in greater detail for five Justices, four of whom they^did not normally meet and hardly knew.

98 Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, 25 09 1976, p. 2612.Google Scholar

99 For some examples under Warren, see Ulmer, S. Sidney, ‘The Use of Power in the Supreme Court: The Opinion Assignments of Earl Warren, 1953–1960’, Journal of Public Law, XIX (1970), 49–50.Google Scholar

100 Anderson, Jack and Kalvelege, Carl, American Government (Like It is) (New York: Warner Paperbacks,. 1972), p. 108Google Scholar; Miller, , ‘Lord Chancellor Warren Earl Burger’, p. 22.Google Scholar

101 Washington Post, 14 07 1972Google Scholar; Time (American edition), 5 02 1973.Google Scholar This last reference was brought to my attention by one of Justice Douglas's law clerks, with the strong inference that it represented the truth.

102 Harvard Law Record, LVI (No. 7, 03 1973), p. 15.Google Scholar

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104 Votes only determine the particular issue before the Court, to affirm or reverse the lower court's decision. The opinion will set out the reasoning and thus establish the principles upon which the particular decision was taken; the implications of a decision can thus be broad or narrow and the power of the assigner is consequently considerable if he can choose which of these two approaches is followed.

105 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education, 402 US 1 (1971).Google Scholar

106 See Miller, , ‘Lord Chancellor Warren Earl Burger’, p. 20.Google Scholar It is easy to underestimate the doubt that exists in the minds of the Justices, even in those normally thought of as particularly ‘ideological’. See Howard, J. Woodford, ‘On the Fluidity of Judicial Choice’, American Political Science Review, LXII (1968), 43–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

107 John Marshall often acted in this way and Charles Evan Hughes was another to follow this practice. See McElwain, E., ‘The Business of the Supreme Court as Conducted by Chief Justice Hughes’, Harvard Law Review, LXIII (1949–1950), 5–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

108 Maidment, Richard, ‘Policy in Search of Law: Warren Court from Brown to Miranda’, Journal of American Studies, IX (1975), 301–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

109 The analysis of Court leadership in this paper is merely a provisional and general sketch. I am hoping to return to this question more elaborately on another occasion. What is not considered here, for instance, is who other than Burger might be leading the Court.