(1891 – 1974) Earl Warren emerged from a working-class family to become Alameda County district attorney Attorney-General of California, three-term governor of California and chief justice of the Supreme Court. Appointed in 1953 by President Eisenhower, Warren served until 1969. He transformed the Court from one sharply divided between justices favoring judicial restraint and practitioners of judicial activism into a more unified body that moved from a focus on economic issues to confront many of the most significant issues in the Court’s history. The Warren Court had a willingness to overturn legislative enactments, especially those from the state level, employing a methodology rooted in social justice, morality and fairness rather than strict doctrinal constitutional analysis.

Most notable are: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), unanimously holding racial segregation unconstitutional and triggering the Civil Rights movement; Baker v. Carr (1962), requiring reapportionment of congressional voting districts; Roe v. Wade (1973), recognizing a privacy right for women to choose abortion; and decisions expanding the rights of criminal defendants. Warren’s enduring legacy is the modern era of the Supreme Court in which groups concerned with women’s liberation, environmentalism, gay and lesbian politics, criminal justice, poverty and immigration could utilize the Supreme Court and other levels of the judicial system, rather than the legislative process, as instruments for social change and protection of the disadvantaged.