William Rehnquist
[2] Historians debate whether he committed perjury during the hearings by denying his suppression efforts despite at least ten witnesses to the acts,[2] but it is known that at the very least he had defended segregation by private businesses in the early 1960s on the grounds of freedom of association.[15] While clerking for Jackson, he wrote a memorandum arguing against federal court-ordered school desegregation while the Court was considering the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which was decided in 1954.[19] At his 1986 hearing for chief justice, Rehnquist tried to further distance himself from the 1952 memo, saying, "The bald statement that Plessy was right and should be reaffirmed was not an accurate reflection of my own views at the time.The Constitution restrains them from effecting this dislike through state action, but it most assuredly did not appoint the Court as a sociological watchdog to rear up every time private discrimination raises its admittedly ugly head.[7]In another memorandum to Jackson about the same case, Rehnquist wrote: several of the [Yale law professor Fred] Rodell school of thought among the clerks began screaming as soon as they saw this that 'Now we can show those damn southerners, etc.'[38] Rehnquist did not handle the direct investigation, but was told by Mitchell to "assume the most damaging set of inferences about the case were true" and "determine what action the Justice Department could take.[44][45] In addition to answering questions about school desegregation and racial discrimination in voting, Rehnquist was asked about his views on the extent of presidential power, the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement and law enforcement surveillance methods.[50][51] In National League of Cities v. Usery (1977), his majority opinion invalidated a federal law extending minimum wage and maximum hours provisions to state and local government employees.Except in the area of the law in which the Framers obviously meant it to apply—classifications based on race or on national origin, the first cousin of race—the Court's decisions can fairly be described as an endless tinkering with legislative judgments, a series of conclusions unsupported by any central guiding principle.Rehnquist consistently defended state-sanctioned prayer in public schools."[60] Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion in Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), which began a gradual trend toward overturning the ban on software patents in the United States first established in Parker v. Flook, 437 U.S. 584 (1978).In Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., pertaining to video cassette recorders such as the Betamax system, John Paul Stevens wrote an opinion providing a broad fair use doctrine while Rehnquist joined the dissent supporting stronger copyrights.Harvard University law professor David Shapiro wrote that as an associate justice, Rehnquist disliked even minimal inquiries into legislative objectives except in the areas of race, national origin, and infringement of specific constitutional guarantees.[61] In Trimble v. Gordon, Rehnquist eschewed the majority's approach to equal protection, writing in dissent that the state's distinction should be sustained because it was not "mindless and patently irrational".[62] In dissent, Rehnquist attacked Powell's opinion, saying: If legislative bodies are to be permitted to draw a line anywhere short of the delivery room, I can find no judicial standard of measurement which says the ones drawn here were invalid.A lifelong fan of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, he liked the Lord Chancellor's costume in a community theater production of Iolanthe, and thereafter appeared in court with the same striped sleeves.[86] However, legal reporter Jan Crawford has said that some of Rehnquist's victories toward the federalist goal of scaling back congressional power over the states had little practical impact.[87] Rehnquist voted with the majority in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), and referred to that decision as precedent for requiring Congress to defer to the Court when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment (including the Equal Protection Clause) in a number of cases.Boerne held that any statute that Congress enacted to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment (including the Equal Protection Clause) had to show "a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end".[90] One of the Rehnquist Court's major developments involved reinforcing and extending the doctrine of sovereign immunity,[91] which limits the ability of Congress to subject non-consenting states to lawsuits by individual citizens seeking money damages.Lopez was followed by United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000), in which Rehnquist wrote the Court's opinion striking down the civil damages portion of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 as regulating conduct that has no significant direct effect on interstate commerce.The federalist trend Lopez and Morrison set was seemingly halted by Gonzales v. Raich (2005), in which the Court broadly interpreted the Commerce Clause to allow Congress to prohibit the intrastate cultivation of medicinal cannabis.Rehnquist authored the majority opinion in South Dakota v. Dole (1987), upholding Congress's reduction of funds to states not complying with the national 21-year-old drinking age.Rehnquist believed that federal judges should not impose their personal views on the law or stray beyond the framers' intent by reading broad meaning into the Constitution; he saw himself as an "apostle of judicial restraint".Again, the vote was 5–4, and again Rehnquist dissented, urging that stare decisis not be the sole consideration: "I did not join the joint opinion in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), and continue to believe that case is wrongly decided."The Court's result in Romer had described the struck-down statute as "a status-based enactment divorced from any factual context from which we could discern a relationship to legitimate state interests".[102] Because of his votes in gay rights cases, ACT UP included Rehnquist alongside Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Jerry Falwell, and Jesse Helms in a series of posters denouncing what it regarded as leading figures in the anti-gay movement in America.In Van Orden v. Perry (2005), Rehnquist wrote the plurality opinion upholding the constitutionality of a display of the Ten Commandments at the Texas state capitol in Austin.Rehnquist wrote a concurrence agreeing to strike down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute as violating the Equal Protection Clause,[106][107] but declined to join the majority opinion's basis for using the Fourteenth Amendment, writing: Had Virginia made a genuine effort to devote comparable public resources to a facility for women, and followed through on such a plan, it might well have avoided an equal protection violation.He noted that, as a private citizen, Rehnquist had protested Brown v. Board of Education, and as a justice, consistently ruled against racial minorities in affirmative action cases.After several months out of the public eye, Rehnquist administered the oath of office to President George W. Bush at his second inauguration on January 20, 2005, despite doubts about whether his health would permit it.
Rehnquist (surname)Chief Justice of the United StatesRonald ReaganWarren E. BurgerJohn RobertsAssociate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United StatesRichard NixonJohn Marshall Harlan IIAntonin ScaliaUnited States Assistant Attorney GeneralOffice of Legal CounselRalph EricksonMilwaukeeWisconsinArlingtonVirginiaArlington National CemeteryRepublicanStanford UniversityHarvard UniversityUnited StatesUnited States ArmySergeantUnited States Army Air ForcesWorld War IIConservatismin the United StatesCompassionateFiscalFusionLibertarianModerateMovementPaleo-PostliberalProgressiveSocialStraussianTraditionalistAmerican exceptionalismAmerican nationalismCommunitarianismConstitutionalismCulture of lifePro-lifeFamily valuesFederalismStates' rightsGender essentialismJudeo-Christian valuesIndividualismLaw and orderLimited governmentMeritocracyNatural aristocracyMilitarismPeace through strengthMoral absolutismNatural lawOrdered libertyPatriotismProperty rightsRepublicanismRight to bear armsRule of lawSupply-side economicsTraditionLoyalistsSouthern chivalrySolid SouthRedeemersNew HumanismSouthern AgrariansOld RightConservative ManifestoConservative coalitionAmerica First CommitteeMcCarthyismUnited States in the 1950sGoldwater campaignReagan eraReagan DoctrineReaganomicsRepublican RevolutionTea Party movementNeo- vs. paleoconservatismFirst termSecond termBabbittBacevichBellowBergerBoorstinBradfordBuckleyBurgessBurnhamCalhounChambersConquestDeneenEastmanFrancisGenoveseGottfriedHansonHazonyHimmelfarbHurstonKerouacKimballKirkpatrickKreeftKristolKuehnelt-LeddihnLovecraftLukacsMansfieldMenckenMolnarMurrayNisbetPangleRansomSantayanaSchaefferSowell