WASHINGTON — When Tony Kennedy was a child in Sacramento, a frequent guest at his family's home was the popular Republican governor, Earl Warren.
Kennedy's father, Bud, was a prominent lobbyist and an admirer of the governor. He "always used to tell me what a principled man Earl Warren was," Kennedy recalled in an interview.
By the time young Kennedy was a college student at Stanford in the late 1950s, his family friend -- now Chief Justice Earl Warren -- had won legions of admirers across the nation as the liberal leader of the Supreme Court.
Nearly two decades after Warren stepped down, another popular California governor was in the White House. When President Reagan named Anthony M. Kennedy to the Supreme Court, he did so with hopes of reversing the liberal legacy of the Warren Court.
But these days, there are as many echoes of Earl Warren as of Ronald Reagan in the opinions of Justice Kennedy.
It was the principles framed by Warren that showed in Kennedy's majority opinion last week as the court ruled 5 to 4 to abolish the death penalty for juveniles.
Warren, who led the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969, saw the Constitution not as a set of 18th century legal rules, but as a guarantee of fairness and decency for all Americans.
When confronted with state-imposed racial segregation in the schools of South, Warren did not look to history to discern the view of the Constitution's authors. Instead, he looked at the reality of 20th century America.
"We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," Warren wrote in his first major opinion, the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education ruling.
When called upon to decide what is "cruel and unusual punishment," Warren said the court must not be bound by the past, but instead should look to "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."
Warren's admirers saw his court as a voice for idealism and an inspiration for the civil rights movement. To its critics, the Warren Court represented judicial imperialism. Across the South, "Impeach Earl Warren" signs went up along the roadsides.
The critics were not limited to the South.
They included the governor of California -- who complained that unelected, activist judges were becoming a threat to democracy. Judges, said Reagan, were making the law in areas such as abortion, school prayer and the death penalty.
