Warren, Earl (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

Earl Warren

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). □

WARREN, EARL

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 kore-matsuv. 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 it did 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.

"In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics. each is indispensable to civilization. Without law, we should be at the mercy of the least scrupulous; without ethics, law could not exist."
—Earl Warren

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.

further readings

Cray, Ed. 1997. Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Schwartz, Bernard, ed. 1996. The Warren Court: A Retrospective. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

cross-references

Japanese American Evacuation Cases; Judicial Review; School Desegregation; Warren Court.

WARREN, EARL 1891-1974

CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE U.S. SUPREME COURT

A Revolution Made by Judges

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once called his appointment of Earl Warren to the Chief Justice of the United States "the biggest damnfool mistake I ever made." Eisenhower regretted his choice because he had appointed Warren for his "integrity, honesty, and middle-of-the-road philosophy"—and while Warren's tenure on the Supreme Court certainly embodied those first two qualities, it just as certainly rejected the third. In fact, under Warren the Court practiced what is called "judicial activism," rejecting the tendency of more-conservative Courts to make decisions based on precedent, following the reasoning and authority of earlier, similar decisions. The Warren court frequently overruled earlier decisions, greatly expanding Americans' civil and individual rights even when there was no precedent for such rulings. The changes in the constitutional rights of Americans during the Warren-court era have been described as "a revolution made by judges."

Early Career

Earl Warren was born in Los Angeles on 19 March 1891. His father, a Norwegian immigrant, worked as a railroad car repairman. The young Warren worked his way through college and law school at the University of California, Berkeley; he was employed at odd jobs, including railroad callboy, mechanic's helper, and iceman. After being admitted to the California bar in 1914, Warren practiced law in San Francisco until World War I. After the war, Warren became a $150-a-month assistant prosecutor for Alameda County, California. He was elected district attorney of Alameda County in 1925. Warren next ran for and won the office of state attorney general in 1939. In 1942 he was elected governor of California. Californians were so fond of the governor that he was endorsed by both the Democratic and Republican parties before he won the 1946 governor's race.

A Controversial Appointment

Warren had been regarded throughout the early part of his career as a staunch, law-and-order Republican. His successful tenure as California's governor, as well as his position as Thomas Dewey's running mate on the 1948 GOP presidential ticket, had made him one of that party's most prominent members. When the Republicans regained the presidency in 1952, therefore, Warren expected to have a role in the Eisenhower administration. That role, after the unexpected death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson in September 1953, turned out to be as presiding judge in the highest court in America. It was a somewhat controversial appointment, the first—but by no stretch the greatest—controversy that marked Warren's association with the Supreme Court.

"Super Chief."

For Warren, who was used to having the resources of a large state government under his control, being chief justice was considerably different from being governor of California. The chief has no direct power to command his fellow justices, but he does preside over the open court and the conferences in which the justices discuss decisions. Perhaps most important, the chief assigns the writing of opinions—essays explaining the reasons for the Court's decision and specifying how the decision should be applied. This job is vital to determining the evolution of the law, but also to maintaining harmony on the Court. Chief Justice Warren found that he had to tread carefully in order to keep the peace between the Court's great rivals: Justices Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson on the conservative side, and their opponents, the liberal justices Hugo L. Black and WilliamO. Douglas. The justices of the Warren court, who all had more judicial experience than their chief, agreed that Warren assigned opinions and presided over discussions and oral arguments fairly and diplomatically.

Stepping Down

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 11 June 1968.

A Campaign Issue

Nixon's campaign had made the Warren court a major issue. He accused the court of "seriously weakening the peace forces and strengthening the criminal forces in our society," and he promised to appoint only justices who would "interpret, not try to make laws." Warren turned to President Johnson to appoint "someone who felt as he did" to the position of chief justice. The plan never worked, however. Johnson's planned replacement, Justice Abe Fortas, failed to pass the Senate confirmation, and Warren was unable to retire until after Nixon's election. President Nixon appointed Warren E. Burger as Warren's successor, and the Senate confirmed Burger overwhelmingly. Warren continued to be active in government, giving speeches and attending conferences and ceremonies. He died following a heart attack on 9 July 1974.

Sources:

Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court (New York: New York University Press, 1983);

John Downing Weaver, Warren: The Man, the Court, and the Era (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967).

Warren, Earl 1891–1974

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As the fourteenth Chief Justice of the United States, Earl Warren presided over a Supreme Court that handed down landmark rulings in the areas of race relations, school prayer, political representation, and criminal justice. Warren was born to Scandinavian immigrants in Los Angeles, California, on March 19, 1891. He was raised in Bakersfield, where his father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad, and he himself worked a variety of summer jobs with the railroad. He put himself through school, earning both his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of California at Berkeley.

Warren began his political career as the district attorney of Alameda County, California. He went on to serve as California’s attorney general, and in 1942 he was elected governor. During his state service, Warren supported the evacuation of persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during World War II. Throughout the remainder of his political career, Warren publicly defended his action, which stands in stark contrast to his role as one of the staunchest civil libertarians ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Warren sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1948 and 1952. In 1948 he was chosen as Thomas Dewey’s running mate, but the Dewey–Warren ticket was defeated. In 1952, the Republican nomination, and the presidency, went to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Following the unexpected death of Chief Justice Fred Vinson in the summer of 1953, President Eisenhower appointed Warren to fill the vacancy.

On the Supreme Court’s docket for the 1953 term was Brown v. Board of Education, a group of cases challenging the racial segregation of public primary and secondary schools. At the time, one-third of the states and the District of Columbia maintained segregated schools by law, often with vast disparities in school funding and facilities for black and white students. The Warren Court handed down a unanimous ruling in the Brown cases in May 1954, declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” A year later, in Brown II, the Court ordered that public schools be desegregated “with all deliberate speed.” In subsequent decisions, the Warren Court struck down racial segregation in public buildings, transportation, housing, and recreational facilities. The Brown decisions were not the only Warren Court rulings that impacted public education. In Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), the Court ruled that state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools were establishments of religion in violation of the Constitution.

During the 1960s the Warren Court instituted a constitutional revolution in criminal justice. In a series of decisions, the Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to apply many of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights—the protections against self-incrimination and double jeopardy, the right to counsel, the right to a jury trial and to confront witnesses—to the states. Some of these protections were encapsulated in what became known as the Miranda warnings. According to the Court’s decision in Miranda v. Arizona, criminal suspects who are in custody must be informed of their constitutional rights, and they must waive those rights before any questioning may occur.

The Warren Court significantly altered the system of political representation in the United States as well. The first half of the twentieth century saw substantial population shifts from rural to urban areas, yet many state legislatures did not redraw representational districts to reflect these shifts. In a previous decision the Court had declined to address the apportionment issue, describing it as a “political thicket” that the Court should avoid. But in its 1962 ruling in Baker v. Carr, the Court rejected this reasoning, opening the door to a series of decisions establishing the “one person, one vote” principle for political representation and applying this principle at the congressional, state, and local levels. After leaving the Court, Warren described Baker v. Carr as the most important decision handed down during his tenure.

Warren resigned from the Court in 1969 and was replaced as Chief Justice by Warren E. Burger. He died on July 9, 1974, following a series of heart attacks, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

SEE ALSO Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 ; Brown v. Board of Education, 1955 ; Civil Liberties; Concentration Camps; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Incarceration, Japanese American; Judicial Review; Supreme Court, U.S.; Warren Report

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cray, Ed. 1997. Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Schwartz, Bernard. 1983. Super Chief, Earl Warren and His Supreme Court: A Judicial Biography. New York: New York University Press.

Malia Reddick

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

Earl Warren 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).

Warren, Earl (b. 19 Mar. 1891, d. 19 July 1974). Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court 1953–69 One of the most liberal Chief Justices, who presided over the Supreme Court's refashioning of US civil rights in the 1960s. Born in Los Angeles as the son of a Californian railroad worker, he obtained a BA from the University of California in 1912, gained his JD in 1914, and was also awarded an LL D in that year. He became Attorney-General of California (1938) and then Governor in 1943 (until 1952). In 1948 Thomas E. Dewey chose him to serve as his Republican vice-presidential candidate. In 1953 Eisenhower appointed him Chief Justice in the expectation that he would be a moderate conservative influence on the court. In fact, he presided over the decisions which outlawed segregation, increased the rights of defendants (Miranda v. Arizona), curtailed the powers of federal investigators, and reformed the criminal system with the application of the Fourteenth Amendment ‘due process’ clause of the Constitution. Under his direction, the Court also established a right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Warren's court used the First, Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Constitutional Amendments to alter the political and social landscape of America. He also chaired the Warren Commission, which investigated the murder of John F. Kennedy.

Civil Rights Acts

Warren, Earl (1891–1974) US politician and jurist. Appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (1953–69), he began the ‘Warren revolution’ that lasted until his retirement. Some of the Warren Court's noteworthy cases include: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which made segregation in the public schools unconstitutional; Engel v. Vitale (1962), which prohibited prayers in public schools; and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which made it obligatory that a suspect be informed of his rights, be provided with free state counsel, and be given the right to remain silent. See also Warren Commission

Warren, Earl (1891–1974) US judge. During his time as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court (1953–69) he did much to promote civil liberties, achieving the prohibition of segregation in US schools in 1954. He is also remembered for heading the commission of inquiry (known as the Warren Commission) held in 1964 into the assassination of President Kennedy; the commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman, a decision that has since been much disputed.