William Rehnquist
William Rehnquist
William Hubbs Rehnquistwas an American lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States for 33 years, first as an Associate Justice from 1972 to 1986, and then as the 16th Chief Justice of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2005. Considered a conservative, Rehnquist favored a conception of federalism that emphasized the Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to the states. Under this view of federalism, the Supreme Court of the United States,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth1 October 1924
CityMilwaukee, WI
CountryUnited States of America
Somewhere out there, beyond the walls of the courthouse, run currents and tides of public opinion which lap at the courtroom door.
I used to worry about every little footnote, ... Now I realize you just need five votes.
The Supreme Court is an institution far more dominated by centrifugal forces, pushing toward individuality and independence, than it is by centripetal forces pulling for hierarchical ordering and institutional unity.
As the demographic makeup of this pool changes, it seems entirely likely that the under-representation of minorities to which you refer in your letter will also change,
To reach its result, the court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the 14th Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the amendment,
The American judicial system is admired throughout the world.
But the greatest injury of the 'wall' notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. . . . The "wall of separation between church and state" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.
No exact formula can dictate a resolution in fact-intensive cases such as this,
Miranda announced a constitutional rule that Congress may not supersede legislatively.
When you are young and impecunious, society conditions you to exchange time for money, and this is quite as it should be. Very few people are hurt by having to work for a living. But as you become more affluent, it somehow is very, very difficult to reverse that process and begin trading money for time.
to say that it is easily applied is just a myth.
To the extent that libraries wish to offer unfiltered access, they are free to do so without federal assistance.
It is truly surprising that the state must assign a greater value to a mother's decision to cut off a potential human life by abortion than to a father's decision to let it mature into a live child.
It's the thing in itself that justifies it.