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Some scholars see the next few years as a period of consolidation in which the Fortas court will refine and clarify the sometimes cluttered landmarks of the Warren era. Others, like Yale's Bickel, suspect that the Fortas court may have even bigger problems, exert even a greater influence on the nation.
If the new Chief Justice has the good fortune to remain active as long as Warren has— he is 77— there will still be a Fortas court in 1987. If he lasts as long as Mr. Justice Holmes, who retired at 90, there will be a Fortas court in 2000. "The court is like the country," says Bickel, "with new forces and new constituencies regrouping. We have a whole set of new problems with very different social, economic, and political trends running than we had at the beginning of the Warren court."
Impact of Technology. At least a few of the court's concerns during the next decade or so are visible, if only dimly. "The Warren court readjusted the balance between authority and the individual," says Columbia Professor Alan Westin. "I suspect in the next decade the Supreme Court will have to think in terms of the impact of large-scale technology on the individual, increasingly in terms of privacy." Westin, like many others, sees much of the court's recent activism as a result of inaction by the other two branches of Government. Says he: "When the nation has a broad political consensus for moving forward, but the political machinery holds it back, the court must go ahead."
In a recent pamphlet, Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience, Fortas spoke forcefully of the need for order—and the right of dissent. The law, he believes, must be a living thing, responsive to social reality and human needs.
It must interest itself, he once wrote, "not in the mere learning of good and evil but in the practice of reasonably mature individual and community living." This comes about, he added, "not through the application of doctrine, but through the application of reason and humanity, maturely, to the complex facts of life." Only by imagination, common sense and compassion, Fortas believes, can the Supreme Court continue to meet the demand of a disturbed and swiftly changing society.