Warren, Earl (1891–1974), governor of
California, chief justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court.Reared in Bakersfield, California, Warren received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1925, he married Nina Meyers; the couple had six children. Warren slowly ascended the political ladder in California—as district attorney of Alameda County (1920–1938), attorney general (1938–1942), and governor (1943–1953). During
World War II, he actively supported the
incarceration of Japanese Americans in detention camps. Known as a political moderate, Warren ran as the
Republican party's candidate for vice president in 1948, on a ticket headed by Thomas E. Dewey, and then sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1952, losing to Dwight D.
Eisenhower. The following year, President Eisenhower appointed him chief justice of the United States.
As chief justice, Warren was less concerned with technical constitutional issues than with the ethical imperatives of the
Constitution—
equality, procedural fairness, and a broad range of rights associated with American citizenship. In
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court overruled
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and unanimously held that segregated public schools deprived black students of the equal protection of the laws. In
Baker v. Carr (1962), the Court, overruling earlier precedent, rejected the doctrine that the apportionment of legislative districts was beyond the scope of
judicial review. In
Griswold v.
Connecticut (1965), ruling unconstitutional a Connecticut statute banning the use of contraceptives, the Court discovered a “right of privacy” in the Constitution, despite the absence of any textual language codifying such a right. In
Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court held that the Fifth Amendment's protection against self‐incrimination required
police to give a precise set of warnings to suspects being interrogated in their custody. Warren was in the majority in all of these decisions, writing both
Brown and
Miranda.Some commentators have celebrated Earl Warren's judicial activism, while others have viewed it with alarm. Few, however, have doubted his enormous impact upon some of the most important social and political issues of his time.
See also
Civil Rights;
Engel v. Vitale;
Jurisprudence.
Bibliography
G. Edward White , Earl Warren: A Public Life, 1982.
Bernard Schwartz , The Unpublished Opinions of the Warren Court, 1987.
G. Edward White
