Poor Joshua by John R. Howard

Author:John R. Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2018-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Visions in Conflict: Rehnquist and Blackmun

There is no way of knowing whether any of the place names in DeShaney resonated with William Rehnquist, chief justice of the United States. They would have been echoes from his Wisconsin childhood. As a child he had lived on North Prospect Avenue in Milwaukee, and his father had worked at the Johnson Box Company across town. The Rehnquist family had deep roots in small town Wisconsin, as did the DeShaney family. His mother had been born in Berlin, a small town in Green Lake County, not too distant from Neenah and Oshkosh. Talent and ambition had taken him from the modest cities and small towns of his native state. Following service in World War II he entered Stanford University. In six years he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, two master’s degrees, and a degree from Stanford Law School.

While talent brought him from his Wisconsin roots, ideology brought him to the Supreme Court. An ardent conservative, supporter of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, he had taken a post in the Justice Department following Nixon’s 1968 election to the presidency. Three years later Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court in an effort to give the court a more conservative cast. In the ensuing years his performance on the bench did not defeat conservative expectations. In 1973 he had been one of two dissenters in the Roe v. Wade case protecting a woman’s right to abortion from state interference. Five years later he dissented from the Bakke conclusion that race might properly be used by colleges and universities as one factor among many in deciding whom to admit. He also dissented from the Johnson v. Santa Clara County assertion that an employer might make gender a plus factor in evaluating candidates for a position for which no woman had ever been hired.

Following Warren Burger’s retirement in 1986 Ronald Reagan nominated him to be chief justice. The nomination revived a controversy from his initial confirmation hearing years earlier. In 1953, fresh out of law school, he was a law clerk for Justice Robert Jackson when Brown v. Board of Education came before the court. Brown challenged a half century of state-mandated racial segregation in the public school systems of the South and asked the court to reverse Plessy v. Ferguson, the case on which legal segregation rested. A memo was found among Jackson’s papers in which his young clerk argued that Plessy was still good law, advancing the view that the Constitutional rights of a minority are whatever the majority chooses to say they are, “To argue that the majority may not deprive the minority of its constitutional rights, the answer must be that while this is true in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are.” At his initial confirmation hearing and his hearing to be elevated to chief justice, Rehnquist denied having defended racial segregation, claiming instead that he had merely responded to a Jackson request for a memo exploring all sides of the issue.

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