Word: rehnquist
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John Roberts not only has an abiding philosophy, but he also has a temperament. He is a technocrat of appellate law and a groupie of Supreme Court culture. He clerked for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist and became one of the most prominent members of the Supreme Court bar as head of appellate practice at the law firm Hogan & Hartson. Roberts argued 39 cases before the court--which meant studying the personalities of Justices to whom he would direct his arguments and identifying the questions that might pique their intellectual fancy...
...unanimous court in Brown needed just 14 calmly crafted pages to deliver its ruling. The Roberts Court devoted 178 pages, in five separate opinions, to its narrow resolution of the smaller questions. And what did the Justices say in all those pages? Little, if anything, new. As the Rehnquist Court held in 2003, schools may not use simple racial classifications as the determining factor for admitting students. Administrators in Seattle and Jefferson County were advised to find more nuanced ways to achieve diversity...
...clerk for Rehnquist in 1980, Roberts was assigned to conduct research for an article on the power of a Chief Justice to set the court's tone. He found an essay in which Frankfurter scoffed at the very notion. Every Justice "is his own sovereign," Frankfurter wrote; you can't expect Justices to get along just because a new chief smiles at them. Rehnquist's article concurred...
...even seems possible that the Court may actually be further from overturning Roe v. Wade today (with only two explicit votes to oveturn) than it was five years ago (when there were three votes to overturn including Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist...
...years. Prayer at public school graduations, for example, is unconstitutional largely because George H.W. Bush appointee David Souter slid left before the case was decided by a 5-4 vote in 1992. The shifts could also mean we can tone down the bitter battles over court nominees. Justice Rehnquist's 1986 nomination as Chief Justice might have irked Democrats less had they foreseen what the study calculates as his tilt toward moderation by 2003, a year in which he voted to reverse a death sentence. And now that we realize how fluid judicial ideology may be, perhaps Presidents can emphasize...