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Brennan's only dependable ally is Marshall, 76, who is truly angry about the court's direction. In a speech last month, he charged that his colleagues had "trivialized" the rights of criminals by regarding those rights as mere technicalities. Overweight and afflicted with a heart condition, Marshall is the least healthy Justice. He does not overtax himself; on some afternoons he can be found in his chambers chuckling as he watches the television show The People's Court. He delegates heavily to his clerks who can predict his fixed views. Marshall is said to be determined to outlast Reagan.
The leader of the court's conservative wing is William Rehnquist, 60, the court's most self-consciously literate opinion writer. Philosophically, he has been too far to the right to dominate the court, but he sometimes manages to win over a majority with his legal acuity and personal amiability. A chronically painful bad back does not seem to have dimmed his humor. Columbia University Law School Professor Vincent Blasi calls him "the master tactician of the right, one hell of an in-fighter," but other court watchers say that Rehnquist is still more concerned with his own ideological purity than with coalition building.
Rehnquist can usually count on the votes of Justices O'Connor and Burger, both social friends as well as con-servatives-in-arms. O'Connor, 54, has turned out to be almost everything that President Reagan hoped for when he made her the first woman Justice. She is a strong conservative (except, not surprisingly, about sex discrimination), who has voted with Rehnquist on nearly all of the cases that were decided by a 5-to-4 vote A hard worker who still manages to make the Washington social circuit, she is maternal to her clerks but a tough questioner of lawyers arguing before the court.
Burger is somewhat unpredictable but he tends to uphold traditional American values. "He likes cases involving God, motherhood, apple pie and Chevrolets," says a former clerk. An antique collector and wine connoisseur, he is formal but kindly and solicitous with court employees. His one real passion as an administrator appears to be reform of the nation's prisons, though as a jurist he is unsympathetic to constitutional protections for prisoners; last term he voted for a ruling that prisoners have no Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures in their cells. Burger, 77, often complains of overwork, but he is expected to remain Chief Justice at least long enough to preside over the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution in 1987.
The balance of power rests with the four Justices in the court's shifting, fluid center. Stevens, 64, appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975, is an iconoclast who likes constantly to question accepted legal doctrine. He has drifted somewhat to the left but is an outspoken critic of each wing of the court, in both his opinions and public utterances. Last term he took the unusual step of reading aloud from the bench his dissent from the court's ruling on prison inmates'