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"Earl Warren, who had previously been attorney general and governor of California, served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1953 to 1969. The Warren Court made a huge number of historically important decisions, including on racial segregation (Brown v Board of Education); anti-miscegenation laws (Loving v Virginia); the right to privacy (Giswold v Connecticut); and the reading of an equal protection clause in the Fifth Amendment (Bolling v Sharpe). The decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which exerted a powerful influence on the agenda of the Court during the entire sixteen years of its existence, reshaped almost every subject area in constitutional law. At its most direct, Brown inspired a more active reading of the Equal Protection Clause, which was soon applied to legislative apportionment as well as to a broadened recognition of the rights of "outsiders" (e.g., aliens and out of wedlock children ) and initiated a new era of legal attacks on gender discrimination. Howritz arges that Brown also introduced radical change in traditional jurisprudential ideas. The idea of a "living constitution" (meaning that the constitution ought to develop to accommodate social change) was perhaps the most important idea institutionalized by the Warren Court. The Warren Court also introduced the idea that democracy was a foundational value in interpreting the Constitution. This book is attended for readers interested in the history of the Supreme Court and the profound impact of the Warren Court on many areas of modern American government and society"--
About the author
Morton J. Horwitz is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History Emeritus at Harvard Law School. He is the author of numerous articles on American legal history, as well as the two-volume set
The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (1979) and
1870-1960 (1994), the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. He is also the author of
The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice (1998) and a coeditor of
American Legal Realism (1993).
