The Supreme Court: Out of Business

Hardly Going In the not-so-distant past, the Supreme Court hewed to precedent and generally rebuffed all but the most monumental constitutional questions. But ever since Earl Warren became Chief Justice in 1953, a new "activist" court has thrown open its judicial windows to practically every ill and issue of U.S. life. In the face of what it regards as legislative inaction, the "Warren court" has desegregated schools, revolutionized criminal justice, rewritten the U.S. political system by plunging into the thicket of legislative reapportionment. To expand the long reach of the Constitution,...

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