Earl Warren

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(b. Los Angeles, 19 Mar. 1891; d. 9 July 1974) US; Governor of California 1942 – 53, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court 1953 – 69 Educated at the University of California in Berkeley, Warren practised law and became district attorney. He served as Attorney-General of California 1939 – 42. In 1942 he was elected Governor of California and was re-elected in 1946 and 1950. He was a very successful Governor as California boomed during the Second World War and in post-war years, enabling state expenditure to increase while taxes were lowered. He promoted the development of higher education in California. Although a moderate Republican he was not particularly liberal on issues of civil liberties. In particular, he supported the removal of Japanese Americans during the Second World War from their homes to camps inland in California.

In 1948 he was selected by Thomas Dewey as vice-presidential candidate on the Republican ticket. Since President Truman appeared to be extremely unpopular and the Democratic party was badly split, Republican victory and his election as Vice-President of the United States seemed assured. Surprisingly, however, Truman won reelection and the Dewey-Warren Republican ticket went down to defeat.

In 1952 he supported Dwight D. Eisenhower for the Republican nomination for president in Eisenhower's contest with Robert Taft. His support for Eisenhower was crucial in Eisenhower's success in winning the Republican nomination. In 1953, when a vacancy occurred for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Eisenhower appointed him to the post.

He became celebrated as a reforming liberal Chief Justice. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown v. The Board of Education declared segregation in schools to be unconstitutional and the court ordered the integration of schools as rapidly as practical. Other liberal rulings concerned reappointment of state legislatures on the basis of one person one vote and protection of the rights of the accused in criminal cases. He believed that the court should interpret the constitution in a manner which reflected contemporary political realities rather than rigidly adhering to narrow legal precedents. As Chief Justice he exercised his political skills to achieve a consensus on the court for his legal philosophy.

(b. Los Angeles, Calif., 19 Mar. 1891; d. Washington, D.C., 9 July 1974; interred Arlington National Cemetery), chief justice, 1953–1969. Earl Warren presided as chief justice of the United States during one of the most turbulent times in our nation's history, during which the Court forged new doctrines regarding civil rights and civil liberties and the nature of the political system.

Warren was born in Los Angeles but grew up in Bakersfield, where his father worked as a railroad car repairman on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Bakersfield was then a rough, semi‐frontier town with more than its share of saloons and brothels. In his Memoirs (1977), Warren recalled that he witnessed “crime and vice of all kinds countenanced by a corrupt government” (p. 31), and that left an indelible impression on him. Summer work on the railroads also left him with knowledge about working people and their problems, as well as with the anti‐Asian racism then rampant on the west coast.

Warren attended the University of California at Berkeley and its law school, served a brief stint in the army during World War I, and then joined the district attorney's office in Alameda County for what he thought would be a brief stint. But he stayed for eighteen years, thirteen as district attorney. During that time, Warren proved an effective, tough prosecutor. But Warren also proved sensitive to the rights of the accused and personally fought to secure a public defender for indigents. A 1931 survey concluded that Earl Warren was the best district attorney in the United States, a fact often ignored by critics who claimed he had little trial experience and was “soft” on criminals.

In 1938 Warren successfully ran for attorney general of California, a post he held until 1942, when he was elected governor. In his one term as attorney general, Warren modernized the office but is remembered primarily for his role in demanding the evacuation of Japanese from the west coast. Throughout his life Warren maintained that at the time it seemed the right and necessary thing to do, and not until his memoirs were published posthumously did he acknowledge that it had been an error. (See World War II.)

A popular three‐term governor, Warren seemed headed for some national office. He ran as the Republican vice‐presidential candidate with Thomas Dewey in 1948 and played a key role in securing Dwight Eisenhower's nomination in 1952. For that, Eisenhower promised him the first appointment to the Supreme Court. Warren had, in fact, already accepted an offer to become the solicitor general when Chief Justice Fred Vinson unexpectedly died on 8 September 1953. Although Eisenhower seemed reluctant to name Warren to head the Court, the Californian reminded Attorney General Herbert Brownell of the earlier promise.

Although some people questioned whether Warren had either the ability or stature to be chief justice, his record shows a sure‐footed instinct in mastering the mechanics of the institution and in what Chief Justice William Howard Taft described as “massing the Court.” Unfamiliar with the Court's procedures, Warren asked Hugo Black, as the senior associate justice, to preside over the conferences until he could familiarize himself with his duties, a task that took him only a few weeks. His political experience also proved invaluable. Warren took over a Court deeply divided between the judicial activists, led by Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, and strong advocates of judicial restraint, led by Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson (see Judicial Activism; Judicial Self‐Restraint). Among the four Truman appointees, only Tom Clark displayed any mental acuity. Within a short time Warren had established himself as the Court's leader, a man who, according to Potter Stewart, “was an instinctive leader whom you respected and for whom you had affection” (Schwartz, p. 31).

Warren took the center chair at the opening of the October 1953 term with the Court confronting one of the most significant issues in its history, the constitutionality of racial segregation. Cases challenging school segregation had been argued the preceding term and then set for reargument with counsel asked to address specifically the applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Within the Court the justices stood divided; even some of those who personally opposed racial segregation doubted if the Court had the authority under the Constitution to overturn it. Warren, moreover, had to trod carefully; he held only an interim appointment until Congress convened in January 1954; at that time the Senate Judiciary Committee, with powerful southern members, would have to confirm him.

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Warren displayed all of the skills that would earn him the reputation as one of the great chief justices in the nation's history. He personally made up his mind on the issue quickly and announced in the first conference following the oral argument that one could not sustain racial segregation unless one assumed blacks to be inferior to whites, and he did not accept that premise. But he also recognized the political volatility of the issue, and that how the Court framed its opinion would be as important as what that decision held.

Throughout the winter and early spring of 1953–1954, Warren kept the issue open, letting the justices talk it out and review the options. Gradually all but one member of the Court, Stanley Reed, came to agree on reversing Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and confronted by that situation, Reed signed on. Warren then circulated drafts of his opinion that carefully distinguished between the principle that racial segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause and that remedies to this situation would be determined in the future (see Race and Racism). He wanted to give the southern states a chance to digest the fact that segregation would end, give moderates a chance to calm the inevitable passions that the decision would arouse, and then invite the southern states to join in framing an equitable decree to implement the decision.

The decision in Brown, announced on 17 May 1954, held racial segregation unconstitutional and triggered the massive civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. But aside from its immediate holding, Brown can also be seen as a major shift in the role of the Supreme Court in American life. For the previous century, the major issues before the Court had been economic, questions concerning the rights of property, and the Court, in defending property, had for the most part told Congress and the states that they could not take certain actions.

The chief issues before the Court since World War II have concerned individual rights, and in defending and expanding those rights, the Court has often told the states and Congress that they would have to change their practices, that they would have to act differently in the future than in the past. Rather than a barrier to legislation, the Court became an active partner in the governing process. This is in essence the “activism” of the Warren Court that upset so many conservatives, but Earl Warren at all times considered the defense and enforcement of individual rights a proper role for the courts; he never saw the role of the judiciary as passive, or as somehow inferior to that of the other branches.

Warren's opinion in Brown has been criticized for its lack of rigorous constitutional analysis, and this too is a reflection of the man. Warren never claimed to have a great legal mind, but he believed common sense, justice, and fairness to be more important than doctrinal hairsplitting. In Brown the key finding is based not on appeal to precedent or even to the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, but on the belief that racially segregated facilities were not equal, could never be equal, and had a detrimental effect on African‐American children. Warren based his conclusions on contemporary social perceptions rather than on doctrine, which also damned him in the eyes of critics.

As one of Warren's biographers has noted, Warren intended to fuse constitutional interpretation with a search for justice, finding in provisions such as the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses the basis for squaring the Constitution with the contemporary demand for increased individual rights. Brown thus previewed the Warren Court's “activism,” its commitment to social justice and protection of the individual against the power of the state. The case did not, of course, turn the Court around all at once; it would take several terms before the Warren Court emerged with its activist commitment to social justice.

Not all members of the Court agreed with this approach, and Felix Frankfurter energetically fought any departure from what he considered the strictures of judicial restraint. Although Frankfurter had supported Warren in the desegregation cases, he and the chief justice soon parted company. Frankfurter considered Warren a mere politician, who should be grateful for the instruction in the law and in the proper role of the Court that Frankfurter stood ready to provide. Warren, however, had been a successful district attorney, state attorney general, and governor, and although he tried to be polite to Frankfurter, the chief justice soon chafed at the incessant barrage of memos and words from his colleague, a situation that the pedantic Frankfurter exacerbated.

Two members of the Court, Black and Douglas, had already moved to the position that Warren would take, namely, that the Constitution gave the Court sufficient authority to remedy injustice. Although he would get on well with both of them, the man who became Warren's closest confidant and chief ally would be William J. Brennan, Jr., whom Eisenhower appointed to the Court in 1956. In many ways, Brennan served as Warren's theoretician and technician, framing the judicial arguments to carry out Warren's strategy. Frankfurter, who had welcomed his one‐time pupil onto the Court, was soon in despair at his seeming apostasy, especially since Brennan, unlike Warren, could parse a constitutional argument with the best. Before long Brennan and Warren began the practice of meeting together before the conference, to frame out judicial argument and political strategy.

The Warren‐led activists became dominant with the appointment of the open‐minded Potter Stewart in 1958 and the openly liberal Arthur Goldberg in 1962, and before long, the barriers that Frankfurter and the conservatives had erected began to tumble. A key set of cases involved the justiciability of challenges to state legislative apportionment. In 1946 Frankfurter had declared that a “political question” and warned the courts to stay out of the “political thicket.”

In 1962, with Brennan writing the majority opinion in Baker v. Carr, the Court held that it did have jurisdiction, and two years later Chief Justice Warren delivered the Court's opinion in a series of cases that, taken together, required a complete overhaul of the nation's state legislative apportionment schemes based on the criterion of one person, one vote (see Reapportionment Cases). In response to Justice John M. *Harlan's dissent that the Court ignored history and precedent, Warren made clear that the Constitution mandated democracy and justice. “Citizens, not history or economic interests cast votes,” he declared in Reynolds v. Sims (1964). “People, not land or trees or pastures vote” (p. 579).

This commitment to democratic procedures, to justice and to individual liberties, marks the core of Earl Warren's jurisprudence, and also its weakness. He believed that in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the founders had erected barriers against majoritarian rule to protect the individual, whether in the exercise of political rights or the expression of unpopular opinions or as a shield against vengeance in criminal prosecutions. The will of the majority expressed itself in the laws of the Congress and the actions of the Executive; the Court, in turn, had been assigned the critical role of ensuring that the elective branches did not ride roughshod over individual liberties. When Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas challenged the Court's authority to bind the states to its interpretation of the Constitution, Warren massed the Court behind Brennan's opinion in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), one of the strongest statements in the Court's history affirming its role as the final arbiter of what the Constitution means.

Whether one looks at the Court's record in matters of free speech, separation of church and state, apportionment, racial discrimination, or criminal procedure, Warren and his Court essentially asked the same questions: Is this fair? Does this protect the individual, especially the one with unpopular views? Does this impose the power of the state where it does not belong? Warren was not antigovernment or anti‐law enforcement, but he believed that the Constitution prohibited the government from acting unfairly against the individual. This can be clearly seen in two cases involving criminal procedure. In 1963, to general approbation from state attorneys general, the Court extended the Sixth Amendment right to counsel to the states in the landmark decision of Gideon v. Wainwright. Three years later, in one of the most criticized of all the decisions during his tenure, Warren attempted to set up clear rules governing police procedures. His opinion in Miranda v. Arizona required that at minimum, a person accused of a crime would be informed of his or her rights (see Counsel, Right to). Warren recognized, and empirical studies have since confirmed, that the Miranda warnings do not hamper effective police work; they serve as a prophylactic to make sure both the state and the individual are treated fairly.

Warren also had no trouble supporting the activist bloc when it read bold new rights into the Constitution, such as in the landmark case of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which proclaimed a right to privacy.

Warren predictably came under criticism from conservatives who opposed judicial activism and his broad interpretation of the Bill of Rights, but even some of his admirers questioned his judgment in 1963 when he accepted the chairmanship of the special commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy (see Extrajudicial Activities). The chief justice did not want to take the assignment, believing that extrajudicial assignments tended to undermine the work of the Court and violated separation of powers. But he found himself no match against Lyndon Johnson's powers of persuasion and the president's appeal to Warren's patriotism. Although Warren did not participate actively in the commission's work, he kept himself apprised of its progress, and took a hand in shaping its final report.

As several scholars have noted, it was not a happy experience for the chief justice, whose instincts for candor and justice collided with his recognition of the political implications of the report and his desire, for reasons similar to that in Brown, to have the report endorsed unanimously. The commission and its report have been under continuous criticism from one group or another ever since; while there can be little question that a man of Warren's integrity would not participate in a blatant coverup, evidence does suggest that even if the commission's ultimate findings are correct, it did not have access to important FBI and CIA files. Warren should have followed his initial instincts to turn the assignment down.

In June 1968, Earl Warren went to the White House to inform the president that he intended to retire, but left the date open until the confirmation of his successor. Johnson named Abe Fortas, whose views coincided closely with those of Warren, but the Republicans smelled victory in 1968, and determined to deny Johnson the chance to name the next chief justice. Then came revelations of alleged financial misconduct by Fortas, and in October Fortas asked Johnson to withdraw the nomination. Warren agreed to stay on until the next president, his old political foe, Richard M. Nixon, named his successor.

In his last term, however, Warren still had one more civics lesson to deliver. Warren's valedictory came on 16 June 1969 in Powell v. McCormack; the chief justice ruled that the House of Representatives had exceeded its authority in denying a seat to the flamboyant African‐American representative from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Although a “textually demonstrable constitutional commitment” gave each house the power to judge its members' qualifications, Warren read this clause narrowly. “The Constitution leaves the House without authority,” he declared, “to exclude any person duly elected by his constituents, who meets all the requirements for membership expressly prescribed by the Constitution.” Any other rule, he held, would deprive the people of their right to elect their own representative (p. 522).

The Powell opinion, like that in the apportionment cases, reaffirmed Warren's faith in the democratic process; but it also, like the opinion he had helped to craft in Cooper, reasserted the Court's primacy in interpreting the Constitution. One week later, he stepped down after sixteen terms as chief justice. In his retirement, he worked on his memoirs (which tell very little about the Court years) and opposed the proposal to create a new intermediate appeals court to reduce the Supreme Court's jurisdiction, a proposal he believed aimed at minimizing the Court's ability to remedy injustices. He maintained a fairly active schedule until he began to suffer from congestive heart failure in early 1974, a condition from which he died on 9 July of that year.

In evaluating Warren, scholars are in general agreement that as a jurisprude he does not rank alongside Louis Brandeis, Black, or even Frankfurter. The chief justice's opinions were not always clear, and they rarely involved complex or sophisticated legal analysis. Warren's strengths, however, lay in his belief that the Constitution embodied certain natural rights that the Court had the power to articulate and that in doing so it was always under the obligation to protect individual liberties and to ensure justice.

Conservatives believed this an inappropriate philosophy and called for a restricted view of judicial activity. Yet the fact remains that Warren's ideas struck a responsive chord in the minds of many Americans. Shortly after Warren's retirement, Professor Joseph Bishop of Yale remarked that nothing would have made the Court's major decisions in such sensitive areas as race relations and criminal procedure “palatable to a large segment of the population, including a great many highly vocal politicians. … But in these areas it is my judgment … that (1) the Court was right, and (2) most people knew it was right” (M. I. Urofsky, A March of Liberty, 1987, p. 852). This sense of law as morality, often derided as an anachronism, showed, in Earl Warren's hands, that it could still be a powerful tool in forging public policy.

Bibliography

• Ed Cray, Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren (1997).
• Jack Harrison Pollack, Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America (1979).
• Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court—A Judicial Biography (1983).
• Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Earl Warren (1977).
• John D. Weaver, Warren: The Man, The Court, the Era (1967).
• G. Edward White, Earl Warren: A Public Life (1982)

— Melvin I. Urofsky

During the 16-year term of Earl Warren (1891-1974), a chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court decided a series of landmark cases regarding individual civil liberties and civil rights, particularly for minority groups.

Earl Warren's legal philosophy was opposed to the laissez-faire doctrine that had previously prevailed. His public life before he came to the Supreme Court had been pragmatic rather than activist. He had a natural flair for administration; his prosecutive experience gave him broad insights into the inequities of criminal justice, and he had a realistic understanding of the debilitating effects of racial segregation.

Warren, the son of a Norwegian immigrant, was born in Los Angeles, California, on March 19, 1891, and grew up in Bakersfield. He attended the School of Jurisprudence of the University of California at Berkeley, where he supported himself by working as a law clerk in a local office. Admitted to the bar in 1914, he had a meager practice in California before he enlisted in the Army in 1917.

In 1919 Warren became the clerk to the Judiciary Committee, a potent force in the California Legislature. He rose quickly to deputy city attorney of Oakland and then to deputy district attorney, chief deputy (1923), and district attorney (1925) of Alameda County. In 1925 he married Nina P. Meyers. During his 14 years as district attorney, he prosecuted thousands of criminal cases in an unrelenting fight against crime. Still, he said, "I never heard a jury bring in a verdict of guilty but what I felt sick in the pit of my stomach."

Attorney General

In 1939 Warren began campaigning for attorney general of California. In the midst of this, the tragedy of his life struck; his father was murdered as he sat by the window in the living room. Made more determined by this, Warren pledged to pursue strict law enforcement and to conduct a nonpartisan office. He was easily elected and soon became one of the best-known state attorneys general in the country. He was the resolute foe of the gambling syndicates as well as organized crime.

World War II was in progress, and these were tumultuous times. In 1941 Pearl Harbor catapulted Warren into controversy. California had long been the base of the aircraft industry and was now producing military planes and "liberty ships." At the outbreak of the war between the United States and Japan it was imperative that war matériel production be maintained. Public sentiment against Japanese people reached a frenzy, especially in California, which had over 100, 000 residents of Japanese extraction, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. Violence against these people began to break out, and accusations of disloyalty to the United States were made. Minisubs of the Japanese fleet were off the coast of California; bombs from balloons fell in the forests of Oregon and Washington. The West Coast became a virtual powder keg. Though history may treat the internment of some 112, 000 of these Japanese residents as a brutal violation of the Constitution, Warren made this decision in a desperate hour, and it was approved by the Supreme Court.

Governor of California

Warren was elected governor of California by an overwhelming majority in 1942 and was reelected in 1946 and 1950, serving until he was appointed chief justice of the United States in 1953. A progressive governor, he brought about many statutory reforms, including a unified judiciary, water control, prison modernization, and a new higher education system. In 1944 he was a darkhorse candidate for the presidency of the United States but failed to be nominated. In 1948 he was the vice-presidential running mate of Thomas E. Dewey on the Republican ticket. In a third try for national office, Warren headed the California delegation to the Republican convention in 1952, but Dwight Eisenhower was nominated. Warren became a strong supporter of Eisenhower in the subsequent campaign.

Chief Justice

When President Eisenhower appointed Warren to the Supreme Court, he said that he "wanted a man whose reputation for integrity, honesty, middle of the road philosophy, experience in government, experience in the law … will make a great Chief Justice." A great chief justice was long overdue. In its 163d year, the Supreme Court had accomplished little in establishing "equal justice under law" in the actual lives of most Americans. While some of the chief justices who preceded Warren doubtless aspired to give real meaning to the phrase, they could not quite bring it about. Though the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment had been written into the Constitution 85 years before Warren came to the bench, only portions of the Bill of Rights had been applied through that clause against action by individual states. Further, the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment had been recognized only in very limited areas. It had not been utilized in the grade schools, in public facilities, or in transportation.

In the field of criminal justice, though lip service had been given to individual rights, the fact is that in state cases poor persons were not furnished a transcript of the trial for appeal or given counsel at any stage of the litigation, save in capital cases. And while the right to vote is the sine qua non of a free society, America had for a century and a half permitted invidious discrimination in legislative reapportionment. Finally, the doctrine of lack of standing in taxpayers' suits had for years acted as an impenetrable barrier to the testing of the constitutionality of many acts of Congress.

Racial Desegregation

The 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution, adopted in 1868, declared "all persons born … in the United States" to be citizens there of and guaranteed them, among other things, "the equal protection of the laws." However, African Americans struggled long and hard before they obtained these equal rights. It was not until 1954 that an 1896 constitutional rule of "separate but equal" treatment of the races was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In his opinion for the Court, Warren declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and concluded that "in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no place."

The Brown decision triggered cases attacking segregated public facilities in transportation, libraries, parks, and so forth. Finally, its doctrine was extended in 1964 to places of public accommodation such as restaurants and hotels. The opinion also sparked a tempest of controversy that brought the dawn of a new day in America's economic, social, and political life.

Criminal Justice

Winston Churchill said that history judges the quality of a civilization by its system of criminal justice. If this be true, American civilization will owe much of its standing to Warren's leadership. Beginning with Griffin v. Illinois (1956), which required states to furnish an indigent criminal defendant with a copy of the evidence adduced at his trial, and extending to Miranda v. Arizona (1967), which afforded counsel to an indigent before interrogation, there was a continual wave of cases that gave substance to the guarantees afforded every individual in the Bill of Rights. These included Mapp v. Ohio, extending the protection against unreasonable search and seizure of the 4th Amendment to actions of the states; Gideon v. Wainwright, giving the 6th Amendment's guarantee of counsel that same coverage; Malloy v. Hogan, protecting the individual from self-incrimination by state action, and Berger v. New York, guarding the privacy of the individual from self-incrimination by state action; and Berger v. New York, guarding the privacy of the individual against eavesdropping by the state.

Like the segregation cases, these opinions aroused a storm of protest. The Chief Justice, as well as the Court, was accused of handcuffing the police, causing a crime wave, and coddling criminals. But the Court continued to follow the principle that when the rights of any individual or group are transgressed, the freedom of all is threatened. In short, it translated the ideals of the Bill of Rights into a strong shield for the individual against both the federal and state governments.

Political Process

As Warren said in Reynolds v. Sims, "The right to vote freely for the candidate of one's choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government." This right includes not only casting one's vote but also the right to have the vote counted at its full value. Nevertheless, prior to Baker v. Carr (1962), the ballots of rural voters had from 10 to 30 times the weight of those of city dwellers. Warren said in Reynolds v. Sims, "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests … The weight of the citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives."

The impact of the voting cases was tremendous. Thus, there were some 25 cases subsequent to Baker. The political process in representative governments was completely transformed. In the long run the effect of these cases may be more important than those condemning segregation. The right to vote is the citizen's most powerful weapon in a democratic society. Because legislators listened to the voices of voters, the equality of those voices foced them to listen more attentively. One of the basic problems America faced in the city ghettoes included the result of the dominance of the rural voter. The new "one man, one vote" slogan changed the politics of every state in the Union. The decisions of the Chief Justice in segregation, criminal law, and apportionment cases culminated in a campaign to impeach him. He completely ignored it. When asked why he did not fight back, he replied, "A senator or governor may explain or defend his position publicly but not members of the Court. We can't be guided by what people think or say … by public appraisal. If we were we would be deciding cases on other than legal bases."

Taxpayer Suits

In his decision in Flast v. Cohen, which the Chief Justice wrote in 1968, he made it possible for citizens to bring "test suits" to the Court. This was one of his last opinions and one of the most important. Because the Court can pass only on legal controversies brought to it, the number of people able to litigate a question is important. Flast was an opening wedge in enlarging the ways and means by which any taxpayer can bring a suit to the Supreme Court. This contributed to opening the door of litigation, bringing forth the greatest surge of citizen participation that any democracy has attained.

Through self-discipline and public experience Warren learned never to permit the clamor of the public or the private pressures of individuals or groups to influence his decisions. Some critics called him a crying liberal, but he classified himself as a conservative-liberal. He had courage, a simple but strong faith in humanity, a practical and varied public experience, and a determination to improve the lot of the common man. As Chief Justice, he extended those horizons in five categories of the law, including racial desegregations, criminal justice, the political process, taxpayer standing to test legislative action, and the all-important field of judicial administration, which enables the courts to function efficiently.

Improved Court Administration

The job of the judge is twofold: first, to determine the rule of law and second, to apply the rule determined. Warren soon found that the legal profession was placing greater emphasis on substantive problems than on administration. As a consequence, court dockets had become congested, the trial bar had decreased in size, and criminal law had become degraded. For over 16 years Warren preached the dogma of improved court administration. In his final address to the American Law Institute on June 2, 1969, he summed up the problem in these words, "We have never come to grips with … court administration… . We should make bold plans to see that our courts are properly managed to do the job the public expects … We must do everything that modern institutions these days do in order to keep up with growth and changes in the times."

In fact, Warren made "bold plans" for the federal system and implemented them. The Judicial Conference of the United States was transformed from a club for chief judges of the courts of appeals into an effective general administrator for the federal courts. Its membership was increased to include trial court representation; the rule making power for federal courts was transferred to it from the Supreme Court; and a complete reorganization of the conferences was effected through a reduction of the number of committees. The administrative office of the federal courts was thus strengthened and reorganized. The Federal Judicial Center, Warren's brainchild, was authorized by Congress and organized into a potent force in judicial administration.

After Robert Kennedy's assassination, Warren feared that nothing could stop Richard M. Nixon from winning the 1968 presidential race. The two men had been bitter enemies since their days as California politicians nearly twenty years before. At age seventy-seven, the chief justice knew that he could not outlast a four-year conservative administration. To prevent Nixon from appointing his successor, Warren submitted his resignation to President Lyndon Johnson on June 11, 1968. He served until 1969. At the request of President Lyndon Johnson, Warren reluctantly headed the commission of inquiry into the circumstances of the assassination of President John Kennedy. He concluded that the killing was not part of a domestic or foreign conspiracy.

He was honorary chairman of the World Peace through Law Center. As chairman of the World Association of Judges from 1966 to 1969, he brought to the judicial forums of the world the message that he had written indelibly into American jurisprudence: only equal justice under law will bring peace, order, and stability to the world.

Warren died on July 9, 1974, in Washington, D.C.

Further Reading

The most significant papers of Warren's early career are collected in The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren, edited by Henry M. Christman (1959). The most complete biography is John D. Weaver, Warren: The Man, the Court, the Era (1967). A shorter work is Bill Severn, Mr. Chief Justice: Earl Warren (1968).

A superficial, laudatory account is Luther A. Huston, Pathway to Judgment: A Study of Earl Warren (1966). Biographical sketches and excellent photographs of Warren and other members of his Court are in John P. Frank, The Warren Court (1964). A critical analysis of the Warren Court and its work was edited by Richard H. Sayler and others, The Warren Court (1969). Other books on the Court include Alexander M. Bickel, Politics and the Warren Court (1965), and Archibald Cox, The Warren Court (1968). Clifford M. Lytle collected various statements from critics of the Warren Court in The Warren Court and His Critics (1968).

1953–69

• Born: Mar. 19, 1891, Los Angeles, Calif.
• Education: University of California at Berkeley, B.L., 1912, J.D., 1914
• Previous government service: deputy city attorney, Oakland, Calif., 1919–20; deputy assistant district attorney, Alameda County, Calif., 1920–23; chief deputy district attorney, Alameda County, 1923–25; district attorney, Alameda County, 1925–39; attorney general of California, 1939–43; governor of California, 1943–53
• Appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a recess appointment Oct. 2, 1953; replaced Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who died; nominated by Eisenhower Jan. 11, 1954
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Mar. 1, 1954, by a voice vote; retired June 23, 1969
• Died: July, 9. 1974, Washington, D.C.

Earl Warren, the son of immigrants from Norway, had a profound influence on constitutional law in the United States. As the 14th chief justice of the United States, he presided over a judicial revolution in the 1950s and 1960s.

Warren's public life before becoming chief justice gave little hint of what he would do on the Court. His career was conducted exclusively in California local and state politics from 1919 until 1953, when he joined the Supreme Court. During World War II, as attorney general and governor of California, Warren vigorously supported the federal order removing people of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast of the United States and confining them in grim camps. He believed, without any evidence, that these people could threaten the national security of the United States during its war with Japan. At the end of his life, Warren expressed remorse: “I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens."

Governor Warren moved to the Supreme Court through his participation in the Presidential election of 1952, when he helped Dwight D. Eisenhower win the Republican party nomination for President. After winning the Presidency, Eisenhower rewarded Earl Warren with the appointment to the office of chief justice.

Eisenhower later said this appointment was “the biggest damn-fool mistake I ever made.” Supreme Court scholars, however, have lauded Warren as one of the Court's all-time great justices. What did Warren do to disappoint Eisenhower and win the acclaim of scholars?

Earl Warren presided over the Supreme Court during a period of great controversy and change. Under his leadership, the Court stated new ideas on equal protection of the laws, the rights of persons accused of crime, freedom of expression, and representation in government.

Chief Justice Warren's greatest opinion was written in 1954, at the beginning of his 16-year term. In Brown v. Board of Education, Chief Justice Warren skillfully influenced the Court's unanimous decision to strike down state laws that required separate schools to be provided for black and white students. This decision overturned the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that had sanctioned racial segregation in public facilities.

Several decisions of the Warren Court greatly expanded the constitutional rights of those suspected or accused of crime. For example, state law enforcement officials were required to exclude illegally obtained evidence in criminal proceedings (Mapp v. Ohio, 1961), to guarantee the right to competent legal assistance for an accused person (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963), and to inform people of their right against self-incrimination (Griffin v. California, 1965, and Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). These decisions overruled earlier Court rulings that had allowed the states to deviate from strict observance of the federal Bill of Rights. The Warren Court moved decisively to apply the rights of an accused person, as outlined in the federal Bill of Rights, to all of the states under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Warren Court's most significant ruling on freedom of expression came in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964). The Court held that a public official may not sue and recover damages for libel against a person who has written untrue statements about him unless there was a complete and reckless disregard for truth. The Court's intention was to remove barriers to the free flow of information about government officials that is a necessary part of the democratic process.

Chief Justice Warren considered the Court's rulings on a series of “reapportionment cases” to be its most important contribution to constitutional law. These decisions, beginning with Baker v. Carr (1962) and culminating in Reynolds v. Sims (1964), established the principle of “one person, one vote” in state and federal elections. State governments were required to apportion, or divide, the state, for purposes of political representation, into districts based solely on population, with the districts as nearly equal in population as was possible. This decision ended the practice of creating districts to unfairly inflate representation in government of some groups at the expense of other groups.

Chief Justice Warren believed it was the Court's responsibility to protect the civil liberties and rights of individuals against overbearing majorities acting privately or through their representatives in government. Warren also believed that the Court should be an active partner with the other branches of government in achieving social justice and protection of the individual against the powers of the state.

See also Brown v. Board of Education; Incorporation doctrine; Judicial activism and judicial restraint; Miranda v. Arizona; Reynolds v. Sims

Sources

• Ed Cray, Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). Lucas A. Powe, Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Bernard Schwartz, Superchief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court (New York: New York University Press, 1983). G. Edward White, Earl Warren: A Public Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)

(1891-1974), California governor and chief justice, U.S. Supreme Court. Warren, born and raised in California, was elected district attorney of Alameda County in 1925, California attorney general in 1938, and governor in 1942. In three terms as governor he reorganized the state government and secured major reform legislation--modernizing the state's hospital system, prisons, and highways, and expanding old-age and unemployment benefits. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him the fourteenth chief justice of the United States. He retired in 1969.

There have been two great creative periods in American public law. During the first, the Marshall Court laid down the foundations of the American system. During the second, the Warren era, the Court rewrote much of the corpus of constitutional law. Warren was the leader in his Court's work, actively exercising his authority to reach the results he favored. In terms of creative impact Warren's tenure can be compared only with that of Marshall.

As a successful chief executive, Warren developed leadership abilities that enabled him to guide his Court effectively. His fellow justices all stressed his forceful leadership, particularly at the conferences where cases are discussed and decided. Justice William O. Douglas ranked him with John Marshall and Charles Evans Hughes "as our three greatest Chief Justices." Those behind the "Impeach Earl Warren" movement were correct in considering him the prime mover in the Warren Court's jurisprudence.

Warren's leadership can best be seen in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision--the most important by his Court. When the justices first discussed the case under Warren's predecessor, they were sharply divided. But under Warren, they ruled unanimously that school segregation was unconstitutional. The unanimous decision was a direct result of Warren's efforts. This and other Warren Court decisions furthering racial equality were the catalyst for the civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s and the civil rights laws passed by Congress, themselves upheld by the Warren Court.

Next in importance were the reapportionment decisions. The Court ruled that the "one-person, one-vote" principle controls in all legislative apportionments. The result has been an electoral reform shifting voting power from rural districts to urban and suburban areas.

In addition to racial and political equality, the Warren Court sought equality in criminal justice. The landmark here was Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which required counsel for indigent defendants. Warren's emphasis on fairness in criminal proceedings also led to Mapp v. Ohio (1961), barring illegally seized evidence and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), requiring warnings to arrested persons of their right to counsel, including appointed counsel if they could not afford one.

Earlier Courts had stressed property rights. Under Warren the emphasis shifted to personal rights, placing them in a preferred constitutional position. This was particularly true of First Amendment rights. Protection was extended to civil rights demonstrators and criticism of public officials; the power to restrain publication on obscenity grounds was also limited. Moreover, the Court recognized new personal rights, notably a constitutional right of privacy.

Warren expressed disappointment that he had never become president, although he had actively sought the Republican nomination in 1948 and 1952. Yet, as chief justice, he was able to accomplish more than most presidents. He led his Court to what Justice Abe Fortas once termed "the most profound and pervasive revolution ever achieved by substantially peaceful means."

Bibliography:

Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court--A Judicial Biography (1983).

Author:

Bernard Schwartz

See also Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; Gideon v. Wainwright; Mapp v. Ohio; Miranda v. Arizona ; Supreme Court.

Warren, Earl, 1891-1974, American public official and 14th chief justice of the United States (1953-69), b. Los Angeles. He graduated from the Univ. of California Law School in 1912. Admitted (1914) to the bar, he practiced in Oakland, Calif., and held several local offices. He served (1939-43) as state attorney general and was governor of California from 1943 to 1953. In 1948 he was the unsuccessful candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket headed by Thomas E. Dewey. In Oct., 1953, President Eisenhower appointed him chief justice to succeed Fred M. Vinson. One of the most dynamic of chief justices, Warren led the court toward a number of landmark decisions in the fields of civil rights and individual liberties. Among these were the unanimous 1954 decision, written by Warren, ending segregation in the nation's schools (see Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans.); the one man, one vote rulings, which opened the way for legislative and Congressional reapportionment; and decisions in criminal cases guaranteeing the right to counsel and protecting the accused from police abuses. In 1963-64, Warren headed the commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy (see Warren Commission). He retired from the bench in 1969. His public papers were edited by H. M. Christman (1959).

Bibliography

See biographies by J. D. Weaver (1967), G. E. White (1982), and E. Cray (1997); studies by A. Cox (1968), R. H. Sayler et al. (1969), and B. Schwartz (1983).

A political leader and judge of the twentieth century. Warren was governor of California before being named chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1953, and he served on the Court until 1969. His time as chief justice was marked by boldness in interpreting the Constitution; the “Warren Court” often brought the Constitution to the support of the disadvantaged. (See Brown versus Board of Education and Miranda decision). Warren also led a government commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (see Lee Harvey Oswald).

Earl Warren served as the fourteenth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969. A former prosecutor, state attorney general, and governor of California, Warren previously had not served as a judge. In spite of his lack of judicial experience, Warren led a constitutional revolution that reshaped U.S. law and society and granted the lower federal courts wide latitude in enforcing individual constitutional rights. Although criticized by conservatives for his judicial activism, Warren has also been hailed as one of the greatest chief justices in U.S. history.

Warren was born on March 19, 1891, in Los Angeles, California, but moved with his family to Bakersfield, California, as a young boy. The son of a railroad worker, Warren worked summers on railroad crews as a young man to earn money to attend college. He earned a bachelor's degree and a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley and was admitted to the California bar in 1914. After a brief period of service in the Army during World War I, Warren returned to northern California where he practiced law for a short time in San Francisco.

Warren joined the Alameda County district attorney's office in 1920 and in 1925 was elected district attorney. Reelected two times, Warren established a reputation as a tough but fair prosecutor. A liberal Republican, he was elected California attorney general in 1938. Though he helped modernize the office during his term as attorney general, Warren's record was tarnished by his actions during the early months of U.S. involvement in World War II.

In 1942 Warren was a key leader in demanding the removal of people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. At the time, Warren and others justified the removal of Japanese Americans on national security grounds, believing that California was vulnerable to Japanese spies and saboteurs. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, 65 S. Ct. 193, 89 L. Ed. 194 (1944), upheld the removal. Thousands of Japanese Americans lost their property and businesses and were "relocated" to concentration camps for the duration of the war. Warren defended his actions throughout his public career, but in retirement he admitted the relocation was a mistake based on hysteria and unsubstantiated fears.

Warren was elected governor of California in 1942 and proved a popular political leader. He was reelected with Republican and Democratic party support in 1946 and 1950. Warren's only political defeat came in 1948, when he was the Republican vice-presidential candidate on the ticket headed by Thomas E. Dewey that lost to President Harry S. Truman. In 1952 he played a key role in securing the Republican presidential nomination for Dwight D. Eisenhower, who in return promised Warren an appointment to the Supreme Court when a vacancy occurred.

When Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson died unexpectedly in September 1953, Eisenhower appointed Warren as his successor. In his first term as chief justice, Warren confronted the issue of state-mandated racial segregation in public schools. The case, which the Court had heard the previous year but was unable to decide, came back for reargument. In May 1954 Warren wrote the opinion for a unanimous Court in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954). Brown overruled the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256, which had allowed racially segregated facilities on trains and by implication in public schools. Writing that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," Warren held that racial segregation in Kansas denied African Americans equal protection of the laws.

Brown unleashed a torrent of controversy and protest in the South and immediately established Warren's image as a liberal. Throughout the South, billboards appeared that read "Impeach Earl Warren." Nevertheless, in 1955 the Court ordered Kansas and other states with segregated schools to move with "all deliberate speed" to dismantle their dual school systems. The modern civil rights movement was founded in this decision, which radically altered the traditional legal position on racial discrimination. When comprehensive federal civil rights legislation was enacted in the 1960s, the Warren Court easily upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. §2000a et seq.) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C.A. §1973 et seq.).

The Warren Court was marked by its strict scrutiny of legislation that directly abridged the exercise of fundamental rights or narrowed the number of people who might exercise them, and of legislation that discriminated against various suspect classes. The strict scrutiny standard of review shifted to the government the burden of proving a compelling state interest that could justify discriminatory legislation. On most occasions the government could not meet this burden. In addition, the Court "read into" the Fourteenth Amendment, applicable to the states, most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights, which until then had been applicable only to the federal government.

Warren himself believed that his most important contribution to the law came in the area of legislative reapportionment. Most state legislatures had not apportioned their seats since the early 1900s. The allocation of seats was based on geographic areas and favored rural districts with small populations over growing urban and suburban areas. Political change was almost impossible because rural-dominated legislatures prevented reapportionment. Until the 1960s the Supreme Court had refused to intervene, concluding that cases challenging apportionment were political questions beyond the Court's jurisdiction.

In Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 82 S. Ct. 691, 7 L. Ed. 2d 663 (1962), the Court held that itdid have jurisdiction, and two years later, in Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533, 84 S. Ct. 1362, 12 L. Ed. 2d 506 (1964), Warren wrote the opinion that has come to be known as the one person, one vote decision. Reynolds and a series of cases that followed forced state legislatures to be apportioned equally on the basis of population rather than geographic areas. Warren noted that "citizens, not history or economic interests cast votes," and that "legislators represent people, not acres or trees." Reapportionment based on population resulted in a shift of political power away from sparsely populated rural areas to metropolitan areas.

Warren also reshaped U.S. criminal procedure, in the process drawing protest from law enforcement officials and those citizens who believed the Court was tipping the balance in favor of criminals. Many cases of this era limited police searches and seizures and the use of confessions and extended the right to counsel to poor persons accused of felonies.

In Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 83 S. Ct. 792, 9 L. Ed. 2d 799 (1963), the Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel encompassed state as well as federal criminal proceedings. Therefore, the state was required to appoint an attorney to represent an indigent person charged with a crime. In Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966), the Court required what has come to be known as the Miranda warning: the police must inform arrested persons that they need not answer questions and that they may have an attorney present during questioning. Warren sought to ensure that suspects who are not sophisticated in law or who are not able to afford ready counsel are not disadvantaged. Nevertheless, rising crime convinced many citizens that the Court gave away too much of the government's authority in Miranda.

The Warren Court also recognized the constitutional right of privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 85 S. Ct. 1678, 14 L. Ed. 2d 510 (1965). Griswold struck down a Connecticut statute that prohibited the dissemination of birth control information. In declaring the right of privacy, the Court laid the groundwork for the post-Warren Court decision in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 (1973), which gave women the right to have an abortion.

In 1963 President Lyndon B. Johnson persuaded Warren to head a commission investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Warren reluctantly agreed to the request but was uncomfortable participating in this extrajudicial activity. The 1964 Warren Commission report has remained controversial. Critics have attacked its conclusions that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin and that there was no conspiracy to kill the president.

Warren informed President Johnson in June 1968 of his intent to retire but left the date of his resignation open. When Republicans blocked Johnson's nomination of Justice Abe Fortas in the fall of 1968, Warren agreed to serve until the next president took office in 1969, leaving the bench in July 1969. President Richard M. Nixon appointed Warren E. Burger as Warren's successor.

Many commentators have praised Warren's tenure as chief justice, but critics have charged that his judicial activism was outside the proper role of the Court and that many of the decisions were based on his personal values rather than the Constitution or other legal sources. Both Chief Justice Burger and his successor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, have eschewed Warren's approach, applying more conservative principles.

Warren died on July 9, 1974, in Washington, D.C.

Quotes:

"Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for it."

"Liberty, not communism, is the most contagious force in the world."

"The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures."

"I always turn to the sports page first, which records people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing, but man's failures."

"The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual."

"Many people consider the things government does for them to be social progress, but they consider the things government does for others as socialism."

See more famous quotes by Earl Warren

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