About the United States Supreme Court during Earl Warren's term as United States Chief Justice and its involvement in politics.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) -- Mapp v. Ohio (1961) -- Engel v. Vitale (1962) -- Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) -- New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) -- Reynolds v. Sims (1964) -- Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) -- Miranda v. Arizona (1966) -- Loving v. Virginia (1967) -- Katz v. United States (1967) -- Shapiro v. Thompson (1968) -- Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969).

A study of the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, discussing the impact of the liberal court's civil rights and civil liberties decisions on American constitutional law.

The tenure of Earl Warren as chief justice of the United States Supreme Court (1953-69) was marked by a series of decisions unique in the history of the Court for the progressive agenda they bespoke. What made the Warren Court special? How can students of history and political science understand the Warren Court as part of constitutional history and politics? To answer such questions, nine well-known legal scholars and historians explore how each justice contributed to the distinctiveness of the Warren Court in Supreme Court history.

This book explains how the debate over originalism emerged from the interaction of constitutional theory, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and American political development. Refuting the contention that originalism is a recent concoction of political conservatives like Robert Bork, Johnathan O'Neill asserts that recent appeals to the origin of the Constitution in Supreme Court decisions and commentary, especially by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, continue an established pattern in American history. Originalism in American Law and Politics is distinguished by its historical approach to the topic. Drawing on constitutional commentary and treatises, Supreme Court and lower federal court opinions, congressional hearings, and scholarly monographs, O'Neill's work will be valuable to historians, academic lawyers, and political scientists.

One of the most acclaimed and best political biographies of its time, Justice for All is a monumental work dedicated to a complicated and principled figure that will become a seminal work of twentieth-century U.S. history. In Justice for All, Jim Newton, an award-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, brings readers the first truly comprehensive consideration of Earl Warren, the politician-turned-Chief Justice who refashioned the place of the court in American life through landmark Supreme Court cases whose names have entered the common parlance -- Brown v. Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut, Miranda v. Arizona, to name just a few. Drawing on unmatched access to government, academic, and private documents pertaining to Warren's life and career, Newton explores a fascinating angle of U.S. Supreme Court history while illuminating both the public and the private Warren.

“With Supreme Inequality, Adam Cohen has built, brick by brick, an airtight case against the Supreme Court of the last half-century...Cohen’s book is a closing statement in the case against an institution tasked with protecting the vulnerable, which has emboldened the rich and powerful instead.” —Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor, Slate A revelatory examination of the conservative direction of the Supreme Court over the last fifty years. In Supreme Inequality, bestselling author Adam Cohen surveys the most significant Supreme Court rulings since the Nixon era and exposes how, contrary to what Americans like to believe, the Supreme Court does little to protect the rights of the poor and disadvantaged; in fact, it has not been on their side for fifty years. Cohen proves beyond doubt that the modern Court has been one of the leading forces behind the nation’s soaring level of economic inequality, and that an institution revered as a source of fairness has been systematically making America less fair. A triumph of American legal, political, and social history, Supreme Inequality holds to account the highest court in the land and shows how much damage it has done to America’s ideals of equality, democracy, and justice for all.

When conservatives took control of the federal judiciary in the 1980s, it was widely assumed that they would reverse the landmark rights-protecting precedents set by the Warren Court and replace them with a broad commitment to judicial restraint. Instead, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist has reaffirmed most of those liberal decisions while creating its own brand of conservative judicial activism. Ranging from 1937 to the present, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History traces the legal and political forces that have shaped the modern Court. Thomas M. Keck argues that the tensions within modern conservatism have produced a court that exercises its own power quite actively, on behalf of both liberal and conservative ends. Despite the long-standing conservative commitment to restraint, the justices of the Rehnquist Court have stepped in to settle divisive political conflicts over abortion, affirmative action, gay rights, presidential elections, and much more. Keck focuses in particular on the role of Justices O'Connor and Kennedy, whose deciding votes have shaped this uncharacteristically activist Court.

Although focused on the Warren Court, the book explores Western political thought from the seventeenth through late twentieth centuries, draws on American social history from the Age of Jackson through the civil rights era of the 1960s, and utilizes current analytic methods, particularly the "new institutionalism."

The magnitude of the Burger Court has been underestimated by historians. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards dotted the landscape, especially in the South. Nixon promised to transform the Supreme Court--and with four appointments, including a new chief justice, he did. This book tells the story of the Supreme Court that came in between the liberal Warren Court and the conservative Rehnquist and Roberts Courts: the seventeen years, 1969 to 1986, under Chief Justice Warren Burger. It is a period largely written off as a transitional era at the Supreme Court when, according to the common verdict, "nothing happened." How wrong that judgment is. The Burger Court had vitally important choices to make: whether to push school desegregation across district lines; how to respond to the sexual revolution and its new demands for women's equality; whether to validate affirmative action on campuses and in the workplace; whether to shift the balance of criminal law back toward the police and prosecutors; what the First Amendment says about limits on money in politics. The Burger Court forced a president out of office while at the same time enhancing presidential power. It created a legacy that in many ways continues to shape how we live today. Written with a keen sense of history and expert use of the justices' personal papers, this book sheds new light on an important era in American political and legal history.--Adapted from dust jacket.