Occupation Fourteenth Chief Justice of the United States

Overview

As governor of California and chief justice of the United States, Earl Warren defied political categorization, confounding his supporters and critics alike. Although he proved to be a notoriously “liberal” judge, he had been head of the Republican Party in California and had won the vice presidential nomination on the Republican ticket in 1948. Prominent in California politics during the reformist Progressive Era, Warren pursued an agenda as district attorney and later as governor that included elimination of corruption within law enforcement, cracking down on gambling rings, and prison reform. Under his leadership as chief justice, the Supreme Court issued several landmark rulings, among them, decisions on religious freedom, criminal law procedure, civil rights and equal protection under the law, and freedom of speech and obscenity. With a long career spanning the years of the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, World War II, the cold war, and the civil rights movement, Warren epitomizes the American struggle to answer many of the moral questions of the twentieth century.

Warren was born on March 19, 1891, and grew up in the booming oil town of Bakersfield, California, where his father worked as a handyman. He graduated from Kern County High School in 1908 and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned both a bachelor’s and a law degree. Following President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a congressional declaration of war against Germany on April 2, 1917, Warren joined the army and completed officer training. In 1919 a college friend helped him secure a position as clerk of the California State Assembly Judiciary Committee. Warren soon became deputy city attorney of Oakland, working his way up to the position of district attorney of Alameda County in 1925.

His professional reputation growing, Warren was elected state chairman of the Republican Party in 1934, despite his belief in nonpartisanship; he repeatedly campaigned as a political independent. In 1938 he was elected attorney general and, in 1942, governor of California. As governor, Warren irked the Republican right when he called for compulsory medical insurance, but his record of fiscal responsibility pleased most conservatives. Under Warren’s watch, the University of California system expanded, the teachers’ retirement fund regained solvency, and the state began developing its massive highway system. Perhaps the most notorious act of Warren’s gubernatorial stint was his support for the evacuation and internment of Japanese residents, including U.S. citizens, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

After his decisive reelection victory in 1946, Warren was considered a candidate for president. He was nominated for vice president on the Republican ticket in the 1948 election, in which the Republican Thomas Dewey lost to the Democrate Harry Truman. He then lost the presidential nomination to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. When Chief Justice Fred Vinson died of a heart attack in 1953, Eisenhower named Warren as Vinson’s replacement. Under Warren’s leadership, the Supreme Court handed down several historic decisions. One of the first and most important of these cases was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which paved the way for school desegregation. The chief justice wrote dissenting opinions in four separate obscenity cases, arguing that pornographers did not deserve First Amendment protection. Nevertheless, decisions such as Engel v. Vitale (1962), which ruled school prayer unconstitutional, fueled public outcry against the liberal nature of the Warren Court. The Court addressed the issue of voting rights in Baker v. Carr (1962) and the subsequent case, Reynolds v. Sims (1964), handing down the famous “one man, one vote” edict, which essentially extended the Court’s power to the legislative branch of government. The obligation of law enforcement officials to advise criminal suspects of their rights was confirmed by the Court’s 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona. Perhaps Warren’s most well-known activity, however, was his investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, popularly known as the Warren Commission, produced a report that received enormous public scrutiny and has been the subject of ongoing debate into the twenty-first century. Warren retired from the Court in 1969. He died on July 9, 1974, in Washington, D.C.

Time Line

Explanation and Analysis of Documents

Earl Warren led the U.S. Supreme Court during the turbulent years of the 1950s and 1960s. Driven by his own moral compass rather than politics, Warren shocked those on the left and right as he made the transition from crime-fighting district attorney to liberal chief justice. He became known as a protector of the rights of minorities and the oppressed, a stance reflected in many of his rulings. Warren’s ability to communicate legal concepts in concise language free from emotion and accessible to the public is demonstrated in his decisions in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Reynolds v. Sims, and Miranda v. Arizona and in the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

Brown v. Board was one of Warren’s first decisions as chief justice and was arguably his most high-profile case. The landmark decision overturned the 1896 Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson and paved the way for the national ascent of the leaders of the civil rights movement, such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the 1896 case, Homer Plessy, who was of European and African descent, challenged a Louisiana law that required blacks and whites to ride in separate railroad cars. Plessy, who was by law black, sat in a “whites only” car and was subsequently arrested when he refused to change his seat. His case ended up in the Supreme Court, where the majority ruled that state laws enforcing segregation, or the provision of “separate but equal” facilities, were constitutional. After the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, laws establishing separate public areas for whites and blacks, known as Jim Crow laws, proliferated in the South.

Blacks in America continued to live under this omnipresent system of apartheid through the early decades of the twentieth century, although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched several legal challenges, with marginal success. Racial attitudes changed dramatically following World War II, as theories of scientific racism that had been almost universally accepted by the public and academia were debunked and the evidence of Hitler’s implementation of racial ideology horrified the world. This new climate reenergized the NAACP, which began to pursue a number of school segregation lawsuits throughout the country. Several of these cases ended up in the Supreme Court; one such case was Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP had organized several families, including Oliver Brown and his daughter, Linda, who agreed to sue the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, for access to schools closer to their homes. Topeka provided eighteen schools for white children but only four for black children.

Brown v. Board was first heard by the Supreme Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, in December 1952. A cautious jurist, Vinson shied away from the kinds of groundbreaking decisions that would epitomize Warren’s term as chief justice. Vinson did not want to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, and for various reasons three of his fellow justices agreed with him. The other five judges thought that the “separate but equal” edict should be overturned. With such a divided opinion, the Vinson Court tabled the case. Warren thus inherited both the case and a divided Court when he took over Vinson’s position. Personally convinced on moral grounds that segregation was wrong, Warren began to develop a consensus among his fellow judges, knowing that only a unanimous decision would send a strong enough message. Through his efforts and those of other jurists, particularly Felix Frankfurter, Warren pulled the Supreme Court together to deliver a nine-to-zero decision in favor of the plaintiffs.

In Brown, as well as in the later cases Reynolds v. Sims and Miranda v. Arizona, Chief Justice Warren voted with the majority and assigned the majority opinion to himself. Warren often assigned himself the particularly controversial cases or the ones about which he had especially strong personal beliefs or feelings. Brown v. Board was certainly both controversial and deeply personal for Warren. Yet it was a unanimous decision, and Warren was careful to craft a document that reflected the beliefs of all the judges, not just his own.

Warren opens his opinion with an overview of the case. As he explains, Brown v. Board was one of four segregation cases that the Court considered together. The Supreme Court often consolidates a number of related cases under one lead case; this was the situation in Miranda v. Arizona as well. In Brown all of the cases concerned children who were denied admission to white public schools, and all plaintiffs claimed that their Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees “all persons born or naturalized within the United States… equal protection of the laws.” Warren clearly states that this case hinges on the Court’s conclusion as to whether separate, or segregated, schools can ever be considered equal.

Following a brief reference to the 1952 hearing by the Vinson Court, Warren addresses a concern that surfaced early in the reargument. One of the reasons the Vinson Court had been so divided was that the judges could not agree on the intent behind the Fourteenth Amendment. Were its authors, in 1868, in favor of segregation, and, if so, could that intent be clearly established? Warren knew that this question needed to be addressed if he hoped to achieve a unanimous decision. Justice Felix Frankfurter, who favored striking down Plessy v. Ferguson, researched the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and found that there was no clear intent on behalf of the framers of the amendment either against or in support of segregation. Warren states that the Court can never truly know the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment’s authors—“We cannot turn the clock back to 1868”—but that this is not the important question. In effect, Frankfurter and Warren took the constitutional question off the table and changed the nature of the discussion. The Court’s decision would hang no longer on a legal issue but on a social and moral matter: the nature and role of public education in modern America.

Once he changed the nature of the debate from a legal one to a question of social justice, Warren sums up the importance of education to a functioning society. He emphasizes that education is crucial to “democratic society,” meeting “basic public responsibilities,” preparing citizens for “service in the armed forces,” and fostering “good citizenship.” By linking public education to American values and civic ideals, Warren persuasively argues for the importance of equal opportunity in language accessible to the public.

Warren succinctly delivers the judgment of the Court regarding whether segregation deprives children of equal educational opportunities: “We believe that it does.” He then makes his case for why “separate” cannot be “equal,” even if the actual school facilities are the same for black and white children. Here, Warren turns to past Supreme Court decisions to justify the current ruling. Sweatt v. Painter was the 1950 case of a black man who was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School. The Court ruled unanimously that Sweatt must be admitted, finding that the segregation of black students in a separate school would in and of itself have a negative impact on their potential to succeed as lawyers. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, another case decided in 1950, had to do with a black student admitted to the University of Oklahoma’s graduate school who was assigned a special seat designated for black students in his classroom, in the school cafeteria, and in the library. Warren notes that the Court ruled that such treatment hindered the plaintiff’s ability to learn. Interestingly, he also cites specific wording from an earlier lower-court ruling and references “modern authority,” which included sociological and psychological publications of the time. Thus, Warren not only draws on specific cases in which the Court ruled against segregation but also invokes language used in prior court arguments against the Brown plaintiffs as well as opinions of experts outside the legal community.

Having decided that the concept of “separate but equal” cannot exist in public education, Warren next had to argue as to how to solve the problem of desegregating educational facilities. His language changes markedly in this section of the decision, as Warren and the other judges believed that it was not the Court’s place to mandate the schedule or methods for desegregation. Warren states that the situation “presents problems of considerable complexity,” which signals that the Court believes that each case will need to be readdressed by the lower courts. He articulates the Supreme Court’s role in this decision very clearly: The question of “appropriate relief was necessarily subordinated” to the larger question of the constitutionality of segregated public education. As such, the cases aggregated under Brown v. Board were “restored to the docket,” or referred back to the lower courts in which they were originally argued, so that the solutions could be worked out there.

Driven by his personal feelings, Warren argued the immorality and social injustice of segregation rather than dwelling on the technical aspects of constitutional law to reach a unanimous decision in Brown. As southern schools fought the mandate to desegregate, the Court eventually issued another decision in 1955, known as Brown II. Also written by Warren, this decision reiterated the principles of the first decision and furthermore stated that the courts and schools must act with “all deliberate speed” to end segregation. Warren’s language inflamed many, but his decisions had propelled a movement. In December 1955, Rosa Parks would refuse to move from the white section of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and what had started in public education would spread to still other public spaces in America.

Reynolds v. Sims

Despite the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, black voters continued to be disenfranchised in the South through the 1950s. Disenfranchisement took many forms, including literacy tests and poll taxes. The process of apportionment, which determined the boundaries of congressional districts, also effectively disenfranchised voters, particularly those who lived in urban areas. Even though many states’ populations were shifting from the country to the city, most states continued to allocate representatives by county, which effectively robbed urban voters of proportional representation in their legislatures. Rural interests thus governed increasingly urban populations.

In 1959 Charles Baker and nine other urban residents sued the Tennessee secretary of state, Joe C. Carr, noting that the state had not reapportioned its districts since 1901 and had thus effectively denied its urban voters their Fourteenth Amendment rights. Baker v. Carr represented a challenge to the Warren Court. First of all, the courts had traditionally shied away from matters involving political districting, concerned that judicial rulings in this area could be construed as a violation of separation of powers; legislative questions were considered political matters not appropriate for Court involvement. Furthermore, the right to vote is not clearly established by the Constitution. The Founders had a restrictive view of who should be able to vote: Slaves, women, and unpropertied males were not considered eligible. In considering Baker v. Carr, the Court was entering new territory. Written by William J. Brennan, the 1962 Baker decision was carefully worded, stating only that reapportionment could be taken up in the courts. The ruling thus let individual federal district courts decide how they would solve problems of malapportionment. Soon after the decision was announced, attorneys filed cases challenging apportionments in several states. By the end of 1962, the Supreme Court had twelve cases pending that related to redistricting. These state cases were decided collectively under Reynolds v. Sims on June 15, 1964.

In Reynolds v. Sims, several voters in Alabama sued state election officials, charging that their Fourteenth Amendment rights, as well as their rights under the Alabama Constitution, had been violated by the state’s existing legislative apportionment. The case also involved a dispute over proposed reapportionment plans, which the plaintiffs argued were unconstitutional. Having established in Baker v. Carr that the courts did, in fact, have jurisdiction over such matters, the Warren Court now needed to address specific cases handed up by the federal district courts.

In the first paragraph of the excerpt of Warren’s decision, he makes clear his opinion that the Court has jurisdiction over questions of redistricting. One of the roles of the Supreme Court is to evaluate the constitutionality of state and federal laws; by stating that the Constitution protects the right of qualified voters, Warren establishes the Court’s role in striking down laws that violate those rights.

As was the case in Brown v. Board, Warren’s decision in this case was strongly influenced by his attitude toward racial discrimination. He mentions the practice of “gerrymandering,” which is the manipulation of election district boundaries in order to influence election results. The term derives from Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812, who redistricted the state to benefit his political party. Warren refers to racial gerrymandering, which was practiced in both southern and northern states; by redrawing legislative district lines, politicians could create segregated, all-black districts or, in some cases, eliminate black voters from an area when it was expedient. Warren points out that malapportionment disenfranchises voters just as effectively as prohibiting them from voting at all.

Warren’s decisions are noteworthy for their clear, straightforward language. This particular document contains an especially unusual and oft-quoted passage: “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests.” This verbiage was actually crafted by the law clerk Francis X. Beytagh, who worked on the case with Warren. Warren read this in the draft statement and thought that the language captured the essence of his “one man, one vote” argument. The passage stands out for the very reason that its tone differs from that of the rest of the document.

A key component of Warren’s decision is his statement that “seats in both houses of a bicameral state legislature must be apportioned on a population basis.” Important here is the assertion that both houses had to use population as a means of determining representation. Following Baker v. Carr, many states refused to reapportion their districts, instead using what was known as the “federal plan,” in which one house of the legislature was apportioned geographically and the other by population. Reynolds v. Sims made clear that the federal plan was no longer an option. Warren allowed for some flexibility in redistricting in order to prevent gerrymandering or to provide for fair representation in more rural states with many counties. However, he reiterates in his decision that population is the overriding factor that should determine the number of representatives.

Reynolds v. Sims was a much broader decision than Baker v. Carr in the sense that it had a dramatic and lasting impact on the political landscape. By specifically defining constitutional districting plans in terms of population rather than geography, Warren summarily eliminated the jobs of many powerful rural senators and assemblymen; rural districts disappeared as states redrew boundaries to conform to the new requirements. Reynolds v. Sims thus helped end one method of black voter disenfranchisement in America.

Warren Commission Report

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository, was arrested for the murder of Kennedy and of a police officer who had attempted to stop him. Oswald claimed that he was innocent. Two days later, while police were transferring Oswald to jail, Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub operator, shot and killed Oswald.

The Kennedy assassination was devastating to the American public, and the details of the crime and Oswald’s murder fostered rumors of a conspiracy. In the early 1960s America was embroiled in the cold war, and tense showdowns with Cuba and the Soviet Union left Americans fearful of the threat of nuclear attack as well as the spread of Communism. As speculation grew that Kennedy’s death was the result of either a right-wing conspiracy or a plot hatched by the Kremlin, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Warren to head a commission to investigate the details of the assassination.

The Warren Commission Report begins with a description of the commission’s charge and then lists the conclusions reached by the investigation. Warren refers to the cooperation of government agencies in the inquiry; one of the criticisms of the Warren Commission was that it relied on the reports of agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation rather than unearthing its own evidence through independent investigations. This feature of the commission and its report fueled later speculation that the government covered up evidence in the Kennedy assassination.

Exhibit 901 in the Warren Commission Report of the assassination of John F. Kennedy

AP/Wide World Photos

The report’s conclusions reflect the commission’s goals of providing an objective analysis of the Kennedy assassination and of quashing rumors. One of the questions circulating was whether Kennedy had been killed by a single gunman; many argued that a second gunman had to have been involved. The document specifically addresses the issue of a second shooter, clearly concluding that a single assassin was responsible. Warren states that the killer fired from the Texas School Book Depository; the commission’s evidence included the fact that witnesses saw a rifle being fired from the sixth-floor window, and police found a rifle on the sixth floor of the building. A factor leading to the multiple-shooter theory was the fact that John B. Connally, Jr., the governor of Texas, was riding in the motorcade with Kennedy and was also shot and wounded. Some speculated that it was impossible for a single bullet to account for the governor’s wounds. The Warren Commission Report’s language is rather vague with respect to this, referring to a “difference of opinion” as to the probability that one bullet could cause injury to both Kennedy and Connally. This vagueness also bolstered critics who suspected government involvement in covering up evidence. Part of the problem was that Warren decided not to include photographs or radiographs in the final report, as he believed that including these materials would have been offensive to the Kennedy family and an invasion of their privacy. Unfortunately, the omission became an issue and undermined the credibility of the final report.

Having determined that a lone gunman in the Texas School Book Depository was responsible for the crime, Warren then concludes that the gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald was employed by the book depository and owned the rifle found on the sixth floor. Warren furthermore states that Oswald (and also Ruby) acted alone. As noted in the report, Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union for about three years and was involved in Communist political activity; this detail, of course, led to the rumors about an international conspiracy in Kennedy’s death. Jack Ruby, in turn, had traveled to Cuba, which led some to speculate that Ruby and Oswald were part of a plot hatched by Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro. On the other hand, Oswald had the name and telephone number of a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in his notebook, which gave rise to rumors that Oswald was a government agent; Warren addresses this concern in the report as well, using very careful language. As was the case with the decision in Brown v. Board, Warren knew that he needed a unanimous conclusion by the commission. Some members refused to approve the final report unless it acknowledged the possibility of a Communist plot; Gerald Ford, then a representative and later president, believed that Castro was responsible for the assassination. In order to achieve unanimity, Warren used wording that allowed for the possibility that future evidence would substantiate a conspiracy or plot.

The Warren Commission Report was well received by the public, becoming a best-selling book. Nevertheless, conspiracy theories continued to emerge, spawning books and movies, further government inquiries, and even the exhumation of Oswald’s body in 1981. The shocking, public nature of Kennedy’s assassination and of Ruby’s murder of Oswald, occurring at a time of heightened political concern, partially explains the skepticism surrounding the commission’s report. Yet the open-ended nature of the document’s conclusions, written to accommodate the different opinions of the commission’s members, helped to spur on conspiracy theorists.

Miranda v. Arizona

During the 1960s the Supreme Court received several appeals concerning confessions obtained by questionable methods. One such case was Escobedo v. Illinois (1964). The Chicago laborer Danny Escobedo was arrested for the murder of his brother-in-law. Police handcuffed him and took him into a separate room for interrogation. Escobedo then asked to see his attorney, who was in the police station waiting to confer with his client. The police denied Escobedo’s request, however, and interrogated him for hours. Escobedo eventually admitted that he had paid an accomplice to kill his brother-in-law; he was convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The case ended up on appeal in the Supreme Court, which overturned Escobedo’s conviction on the basis that his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination had been violated.

The decision in Escobedo v. Illinois applied only to cases where the suspect’s attorney was present at the time of the interrogation. For this reason, the Court continued to receive appeals cases involving suspects who had been questioned before a lawyer was present. By November 1965, the Supreme Court faced 170 appeals concerning such questions. The Warren Court narrowed the 170 appeals to four representative cases, grouped together under Miranda v. Arizona.

Chief Justice Warren begins his decision with an assessment of “American criminal jurisprudence,” or the balance between prosecuting suspected criminals in society and preserving the constitutional rights of those suspected criminals. He refers to Escobedo v. Illinois and the role of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits a person from being “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Warren reviews the fact that the Escobedo decision was open to wide interpretation by the lower courts, prosecutors, and police officers; he notes that the Supreme Court had already “granted certiorari” to several related cases, meaning they had been accepted for review. Finally, Warren reinforces his belief that both Escobedo v. Illinois and Miranda v. Arizona are cases whose rulings do not break new ground in terms of the Court’s role but rather merely reinforce individuals’ rights as stated in the Constitution. Warren quotes the decision in Cohens v. Virginia (1821), in which Chief Justice John Marshall asserted the Court’s authority to rule in lower court cases involving the violation of individuals’ constitutional rights, to further make this point.

One of the controversial aspects of Warren’s decision was his inclusion of specific guidelines for advising suspects of their rights. Justice Brennan asked Warren to allow state legislatures to develop their own language, but Warren declined to remove the instructions from the decision. Warren gives the states room for “creative rulemaking” but provides specific language to be used; this is the origin of the commonly known phrase “You have the right to remain silent.” It is clear from his language that Warren’s primary interest is in achieving balance of power between the suspect and his or her interrogators. Knowledge of one’s rights, he notes, helps to combat the “inherent pressures of the interrogation atmosphere.”

Warren then turns to the four cases grouped together under the label Miranda v. Arizona. He explains how the cases are similar: The defendants were not advised of their rights while being questioned in a “police-dominated atmosphere.” Warren emphasizes the psychological impact of the interrogation process, particularly the nature of “incommunicado” questioning, where the suspect is isolated from any outside influence. From his years in law enforcement, Warren was highly sensitive to the potential for interrogators to abuse their power, and his language reveals his concern for protecting suspects from questionable interview tactics.

Having established that Escobedo v. Illinois set the precedent for protecting the Fifth Amendment rights of suspects in custody and that the nature of police interrogation lends itself to the potential for self-incrimination, Warren concludes that the accused must be explicitly advised of his or her rights and must be allowed to exercise those rights. He then addresses a criticism of the Escobedo decision, which was also an issue with the cases considered under Miranda v. Arizona. Many, particularly prosecutors and the police, believed that advising suspects of their rights hindered the efforts of law enforcement to combat crime: Notifying detainees that they could retain counsel or refrain from answering questions might result in guilty criminals going free. Warren cites a previous Court decision, Chambers v. Florida, in his response to this concern. Chambers v. Florida was a 1940 case in which the Supreme Court reversed the conviction and associated death sentences of four black tenant farmers whose confessions were coerced by their interrogators. Announcing the unanimous decision in the case, Justice Hugo Black specifically dismissed law enforcement’s argument that the well-being of the community outweighed the negative aspects of the questioning tactics. Warren also quotes Justice Louis Brandeis, a member of the Supreme Court who, like Warren, is known for many decisions that advanced causes of social justice. The quotation is from Brandeis’s dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States, a 1928 case in which the Court ruled that evidence obtained from secret wiretaps planted in the building of Roy Olmstead, a bootlegger, was admissible in court. In his dissent, Brandeis argued that such government activity “breeds contempt for law.” Warren uses these two examples as evidence of legal precedent for his own decision in this case.

Warren briefly reviews the details of the Miranda case before rendering his decision to reverse Miranda’s conviction. Ernesto Miranda was a poor, uneducated man with limited English skills. Diagnosed with a sociopathic personality disorder, he had a string of prior arrests for rape and lewd conduct. Police arrested Miranda when they found a vehicle outside Miranda’s home that was identical to that owned by a woman who had been raped and kidnapped. The victim identified Miranda as the perpetrator of the crime. As Warren notes, Miranda signed a written admission of guilt stating that he confessed with complete understanding of his rights, despite the fact that the arresting officers admitted that they had not advised him. As an unsophisticated, mentally ill defendant, Miranda was the very kind of person who, Warren believed, needed protection from the sophisticated methods of law-enforcement interrogation. Guilty or not, Miranda was entitled to his constitutional rights.

Law enforcement and many politicians howled over the decision in Miranda v. Arizona, promising that guilty criminals would go free. The public reaction was also not entirely favorable; the Warren Court’s reputation for liberal rulings was only reinforced by this decision. Ever the champion of individual rights, Warren stood by his decision. Today, the concept of a “Miranda warning,” or notification of one’s right to remain silent, is a cornerstone of the American criminal justice system.

Impact and Legacy

Historians typically comment on the seeming contradictions in Warren’s career and personality; his apparent transformation from a conservative state politician to a liberal chief justice confounded his peers as well. The crime-fighting district attorney became the champion of the accused. The advocate of Japanese internment fought against segregation. In one sense, Warren’s life and career reflect the fundamental shifts that occurred in American society during the 1950s and 1960s, as changing racial attitudes began to radically alter the ways in which minorities and underprivileged groups were viewed.

Warren’s impact on the role of the Supreme Court is also reflective of these broader changes in American society and has been the source of much criticism leveled against him, today and in his own time. Never much of a student, he based his legal decisions not on carefully argued theory but on his own belief system, what one historian has referred to as “a simple moral compass” (Cray, p. 11). As a result, the Supreme Court justices under Warren’s leadership became the defenders of the oppressed and, in many cases, the most despised members of American society. Fellow jurist Felix Frankfurter increasingly despaired at Warren’s judicial activism, fearing that the Court was overstepping its authority, particularly with respect to the state’s jurisdiction in criminal matters. For Warren, however, the Court had a responsibility to protect individuals from those very state authorities, and in many cases the individuals most in need of protection were the ones least able to defend themselves: minorities and the poor.

Warren revolutionized Americans’ view of the Supreme Court, situating it as an advocate for social justice. Many of his decisions affected the most sensitive areas of daily life, including religion, race, marriage, and free speech. His often controversial rulings earned Warren the ire of many but established his pivotal importance in American political and legal history.

Essential Quotes

Questions for Further Study

Key Sources

Papers related to Warren’s service as district attorney of Alameda County and as governor of California are housed in the California State Archives, with an inventory available online (www.oac.cdlib.org). Documents generated during his term as chief justice of the United States are located in the Library of Congress and are also inventoried online (www.loc.gov). The Memoirs of Earl Warren was published in 1977.

Further Reading