Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist
Today’s Justice of the Day is: WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST. Chief Justice Rehnquist was born on this day, October 1, in 1924.
Chief Justice Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the state where he grew up but would spend very little time as an adult. He studied at Stanford University, earning a B.A. and an M.A. in 1948, before he briefly attended Harvard University and received another M.A. in 1949. Chief Justice Rehnquist then returned to Stanford to study law, graduating with an LL.B. in 1952.
Before starting his undergraduate academic career, Chief Justice Rehnquist served as a soldier in the United States Army’s Air Corps. during the Second World War (from 1943 to 1946). Upon graduation from law school, he became a law clerk to Justice Robert H. Jackson during the October 1952 term, and was involved in one of the Supreme Court of the United States’ most famous controversies, Brown v. Board of Education (I) (1954). Chief Justice Rehnquist would later be haunted by that case because of a memo he wrote while it was being considered, one that articulated various justifications for why SCUS precedent upholding institutionalized racial segregation, which was created by the odious opinion of the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), should have been upheld. He would later try to explain away the document by arguing (not entirely persuasively) that he was simply laying out some of Justice Jackson’s thoughts on Brown, rather than his own. Immediately after his clerkship came to an end, Chief Justice Rehnquist entered private practice in Phoenix, Arizona, and would remain there until 1969, when he became Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice (he ultimately served in that capacity until his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States).
Chief Justice Rehnquist was nominated from the state of Virginia to be an Associate Justice by President Richard M. Nixon on October 22, 1971, to a seat vacated by Justice John Marshall Harlan (II). He was confirmed by the United States Senate on December 10, and received his commission five days later. Then-Associate Justice Rehnquist took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on January 7, 1972, and served out that part of his tenure on the Burger Court. His service in that capacity was terminated because of his appointment to be Chief Justice of the United States, a position he was nominated for (again, from the state of Virginia) by President Ronald Reagan on June 20, 1986. Chief Justice Rehnquist was chosen to fill the seat vacated by Chief Justice Warren Burger, and he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 17. He received his commission on September 25, and took the oath of office for that position on September 26. Chief Justice Rehnquist’s service was terminated on September 3, 2005, due to his death.
While Chief Justice Rehnquist struggled to build majorities during his early years on the SCUS, and frequently found himself alone (or nearly alone) in dissent from the liberalism of Justices William J. Brennan, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, his views would later become controlling precedent when the Court’s composition changed in the 1980’s and early-1990’s. While he was rarely if ever classified as the most conservative Member of the SCUS, he nonetheless adopted a strongly right-leaning ideology (especially on social issues) all throughout his tenure, as can be seen in cases such as Roe v. Wade (1973), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and many, many more in between. Like Justice Hugo Black, Chief Justice Rehnquist was often criticized for importing his personal views into SCUS doctrine, and (unlike Justice Black) was also frequently attacked for his perceived insensitivity to women, racial minorities, and the LGBTQ community. Whether or not he did in fact let his personal opinions unduly influence his judicial ones, his intellect and lengthy tenure (his is the eighth longest in SCUS history to date) allowed him to have a profound impact on the Court.
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*Fun fact about the above portrait: When it was originally drawn, Chief Justice Rehnquist was depicted wearing the traditional black attire of American judges, but he insisted that the gold stripes be added to the painting after he began wearing them on his robes (he is said to have added them after being inspired by a costume he saw in the play "Iolanthe")