Rehnquist's Mixed Legacy
Sixteen men have served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Some, like Melville W. Fuller, who presided from 1888 to 1910, inhabit the shadows of the court's history. Others, possessed of deeply held views and blessed with longevity or a favorable political wind at their backs, have touched Americans more profoundly than many presidents.
The fourth chief, John Marshall, was the first to leave his mark. It will surprise many people to learn that nothing in the Constitution explicitly authorizes the Supreme Court to decide whether acts of Congress are constitutional. In Marbury vs. Madison, Marshall deduced this power from the structure of government that the Constitution created -- and thus he created the institution of judicial review. More than a century later, Chief Justice Earl Warren led his colleagues to apply constitutional principles to outlaw racial segregation and to expand the rights of criminal defendants. Racial equality and the right to a lawyer may seem like obvious constitutional principles today; they didn't before Warren.
When William H. Rehnquist joined the Supreme Court in 1972, he had ambitions that were similar in size but different in substance. Did he succeed? After 33 years on the court, the last 19 as its leader, Rehnquist's record is mixed. The Rehnquist court has slowed the expansion of civil rights but has not reversed it in most areas.
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A Victim of Cancer
The chief justice has cancer and is mostly working from home. This comes after years of rumors that back troubles would force his resignation. The cancer diagnosis last fall intensified predictions of his impending retirement and sparked new discussions of his legacy and the court's future direction.
Rehnquist found his politics early, in dinner-table discussions with his Milwaukee parents and, after Pearl Harbor, as a neighborhood block captain responsible for reporting "subversive activities" to the police. His interest in history, forged in high school reenactments of the nation's founding, has endured in his writings, on the bench and off.
In those writings, Rehnquist will often hearken back to the period after the Civil War. Many think of the Reconstruction era as one of brutal repression of minorities and a pinched view of the federal government. Rehnquist, however, finds his legal and ideological touchstones in those years: states' rights, a narrow view of congressional authority and a bone-deep skepticism about the notion that law should protect private behavior. As a Supreme Court clerk, Rehnquist wrote memos urging his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson, to dissent in voting-rights and school desegregation cases. Young Rehnquist scornfully dismissed pleas from criminal defendants. When Rehnquist became a justice himself, he took his own advice.
