Oct. 15 1956—So much for basing Supreme Court selections on short-term political calculations. Informed by his campaign advisers that appointing a Catholic Democrat from the Northeast to the Supreme Court would attract critical voters in the upcoming presidential election, President Eisenhower recess-appoints New Jersey supreme court justice William J. Brennan, Jr. to the vacancy resulting from Sherman Minton’s resignation. That decision appears to have been as unnecessary as it was foolish: Eisenhower wins re-election over Adlai Stevenson by a huge margin, 57% to 42% in the popular vote and 457 to 73 in the electoral college. And, more than any other justice in history, Brennan deforms the Supreme Court’s understanding of the Constitution during his 34-year tenure.
Oct. 16 1898—William Orville Douglas, who, alas, will become the longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history, is born in the town of Maine in Minnesota. (See This Week entry for April 4, 1939, for Judge Richard A. Posner’s colorful summary of Douglas’s life and career.)
Oct. 20 2006—Another Ninth Circuit ruling, another unanimous reversal by the Supreme Court. Fifteen days earlier, a two-judge motions panel of the Ninth Circuit, consisting of Clinton appointees A. Wallace Tashima and William A. Fletcher, had issued a four-sentence order enjoining Arizona from enforcing the voter-identification provisions of its Proposition 200 in the November 2006 election. In its unanimous per curiam reversal (in Purcell v. Gonzales), the Supreme Court observes that the Ninth Circuit panel “fail[ed] to provide any factual findings or indeed any reasoning of its own” and failed to give appropriate deference to—or even to await—the factual findings underlying the district court’s determination that a preliminary injunction was not warranted.
Oct. 21 1949—President Truman recess-appoints David L. Bazelon to the D.C. Circuit. With a lifetime appointment from Truman a few months later, Bazelon serves for 30 years in active status and an additional 14 years in senior status. On his death in 1983, a New York Times obituary praises him for “expanding the rights of criminal defendants” and for disregarding precedent: “Rather than follow precedent set in a simpler time, he questioned the status quo and sought to apply new findings in the social sciences and psychiatry to issues the court faced.” The obituary also states that Bazelon “believed the judiciary should reach beyond the bench and speak out on social issues,” but that he “was assailed by conservatives as being soft on crime.”
One testament to Bazelon’s craftsmanship: In 1978, in a unanimous opinion written by Justice Rehnquist (in Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v. Natural Resources Defense Council), the Supreme Court reverses decisions by Bazelon that would have overturned the Atomic Energy Commission’s grant of an operating license and a permit to nuclear power plants. Bazelon’s decisions “seriously misread or misapplied” basic principles of administrative law, the Court rules, and amounted to “judicial intervention run riot.”
For an explanation of this recurring feature, see here.