The New Supreme Court Session Opens Monday. It Will Not Be Pretty.

Swamps tend to be rife with prehistoric detritus, and this one is no exception. The chief justice at the time of Bush v. Gore was William H. Rehnquist, who had been nominated by Richard M. Nixon. Stevens, the leading liberal, was a Gerald Ford pick. The president with the greatest influence on the court was Ronald Reagan, with three justices to his name (Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush each had two). The court was in transition, morphing slowly into the partisan institution we experience today.

For the nearly two postwar decades that Earl Warren presided as chief justice, the court pushed the nation insistently to the left, desegregating schools (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954); making bans on interracial marriage illegal (Loving v. Virginia, 1967); affirming the right of married couples to use contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965); protecting First Amendment rights, especially when it came to press coverage of public officials (New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964); and enshrining the rights of people accused of crimes (Mapp v. Ohio, 1961; Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963; Miranda v. Arizona, 1966).

Miranda, for many Americans, proved a step too far, especially at a time of rising crime. “The court had gone crazy,” many people at the time thought, Baum says. In his 1968 run for the presidency, Nixon singled out Miranda and another Warren court decision (Escobedo v. Illinois, on the right to counsel) for “seriously hamstringing the peace forces in our society and strengthening the criminal forces,” as he put it in a speech in New York that May. “From the point of view of the criminal forces, the cumulative impact of these decisions has been to set free patently guilty individuals on the basis of legal technicalities,” Nixon said.