The Warren Court

In the 1952 contest for the Republican Party presidential nomination, Dwight Eisenhower outmaneuvered former California governor Earl Warren and then named Richard Nixon, not Warren, as his running mate. Seeking to secure Warren's support going into the November election, Eisenhower promised him a seat on the Supreme Court when a vacancy opened. In September 1953, Eisenhower kept his word and designated Warren to be Chief Justice, and the Senate confirmed Warren's nomination the following March. Thinking he was appointing a fellow moderate conservative, Eisenhower later said that the decision to place Warren in the Chief Justice's seat was one of his biggest regrets.

Immediately upon occupying the Chief Justice's seat, Warren patiently assembled a unanimous opinion as it handed down one of the most important decisions in Supreme Court history. As you learned in the Civil Rights Timeline, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, reversing the "separate but equal" precedent established in 1896. Predictably, opposition to the Court's ruling in the South was intense, leading to the appearance of "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards across the region.

Although the Court's decision in Brown established the Warren Court's reputation for liberal judicial activism, it was a series of controversial civil liberties decisions in the 1960s that cemented this reputation. Most notable among these were decisions that addressed due process of law: Mapp v. Ohio (1961), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) were each landmark cases strengthening the rights of those accused of a crime. In addition, the Warren Court provoked outrage among conservatives by outlawing prayer in public schools in a pair of decisions in 1962 and 1963.

Addressing another aspect of equality, the Warren Court also took a firm stance on the issue of legislative reapportionment. In a series of decisions between 1962 and 1964, Warren led a majority to eliminate the inequities between rural and urban voters in state legislative elections. After retiring from the Court, Warren claimed that establishing the principle of "one person, one vote" was his greatest accomplishment on the bench.