Word: rehnquist
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...Another disappointment may be that outside law schools, the Rehnquist court is probably best known for its bitterly split 5-4 decision in 2000 in Bush v. Gore, which many Democrats saw as sneaky conservative prestidigitation to give George W. Bush the White House. It was one of the few decisions in which Rehnquist supported the use of federal power to restrict a state, in this case Florida, whose supreme court had ordered a manual recount of the ballots in the presidential race. The court ruled that because Florida counties had no consistent standard for such a recount, the votes...
...Bush v. Gore struck a direct blow to the left, but for the most part, Rehnquist led a somewhat attenuated revolution for the right. He could never muster majorities to overturn older liberal precedents such as Roe v. Wade, which prohibited states from outlawing abortion, or stop newer ones such as Lawrence v. Texas, which prohibited them from outlawing sodomy. Rehnquist also found himself in the minority when the court struck down school prayers at graduations and football games. Even so, when you look back to the ambitious goals the young Rehnquist set for himself...
...Bill Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee to Margery, a part-time translator who spoke five languages, and William Benjamin, who sold paper wholesale. Justice Rehnquist almost never cooperated with profile writers, but when the New York Times Magazine came calling in 1985, he spoke sarcastically of trying to locate the source of his ideas in his past. "It may have something to do with my childhood," he said mockingly. But it's worth noting that Rehnquist was raised in a solidly Republican home and never found reason to reject the Willkie-Hoover-Taft conservatism instilled at the dinner table...
...After a stint as an Army Air Corps weather observer in North Africa during World War II, Rehnquist sought out sunny Stanford University for his education. At Stanford Law, he finished first in a class that included Sandra Day, who would later become Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. He then won a plum clerkship in the Supreme Court offices of Robert Jackson, well known at the time as the Justice who had taken leave to serve as chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials...
...stint with Justice Jackson became the focus of some scrutiny during Rehnquist's 1971 Senate confirmation process. After the confirmation hearings ended but before the full Senate voted, Newsweek printed excerpts from a memo Rehnquist had written for Jackson in 1952. The memo was titled "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases," one of which was Brown v. Board of Education, the school-integration case then before the court. The memo noted that "it was not part of the judicial function to thwart public opinion except in extreme cases." And segregation, Rehnquist declared, "quite clearly is not one of those...