Discover

'Warren Earl Burger' (September 17 1907 – June 25 1995) was Chief Justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986. Under his leadership, the United States Supreme Court delivered major decisions on abortion, capital punishment, religious establishment, and school desegregation. He worked hard for the adoption of modern management techniques in the nation's judicial system.

Contents

Early years

Education

Politics

National prominence

The Burger Court

Family

Trivia

See also

Notes

References

Early years

Burger was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of seven children. His parents were of Swiss German descent. His grandfather, Joseph Burger, had emigrated from Switzerland and joined the Union Army when he was 14. Joseph Burger fought and was wounded in the Civil War, and was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Warren Burger grew up on the family farm near the edge of St. Paul. He attended John A. Johnson High School, where he was president of the student council. He competed in hockey, football, track, and swimming. While in high school, he wrote articles on high school sports for local newspapers. He graduated in 1925.
That same year, Burger also worked with the crew building the Robert Street Bridge, a crossing of the Mississippi River in St. Paul that still exists. Concerned about the number of deaths on the project, he asked that a net be installed to catch anyone who fell, but was rebuffed by managers. In later years, Burger made a point of visiting the bridge whenever he came back to town.
In 1937, Burger served as the eighth president of the Saint Paul Jaycees.

Education

A graduate of Johnson High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he attended night school at the University of Minnesota while selling insurance for Mutual Life Insurance. He then enrolled at what was then known as the St. Paul College of Law, now known as William Mitchell College of Law, receiving his degree in 1931. He took a job at the firm of Boyensen, Otis and Faricy (which became Faricy, Burger, Moore & Costello). He also taught for twelve years at St. Paul College of Law. Harry Blackmun, his future colleague on the Supreme Court of the United States, was a longtime friend, although they grew apart during their service on the Court.

Politics

His political involvement started slowly, but became powerful. He supported Minnesota governor Harold E. Stassen's unsuccessful pursuit of the Republican nomination for president in 1948. In 1952, at the Republican convention, he played a key role in Dwight D. Eisenhower's nomination by delivering the Minnesota delegation. After he was elected, President Eisenhower appointed Burger as the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division of the Justice Department.
In this role, he first argued in front of the Supreme Court. The case involved John P. Peters, a Yale University professor who worked as a consultant to the government. He had been discharged from his position on loyalty grounds. Supreme Court cases are usually argued by the Solicitor General, but he disagreed with the government's position and refused to argue the case. Burger lost the case. Shortly after, Burger appeared in a case defending the U.S. against claims from the Texas City ship explosion disaster, successfully arguing that the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1947 did not allow a suit for negligence in policy making; the U.S. won the case (''Dalehite, et. al., vs. United States'' 346 U.S. 15 (1953)). In 1956, Eisenhower appointed him to a position on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He remained on the Court of Appeals for 13 years.

National prominence

His road to the Chief Justice position was not direct. In 1968, Earl Warren, the Chief Justice, announced his intention to resign. President Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to the position, but the Senate did not confirm him. Warren then delayed his resignation for a year. President Richard Nixon nominated Burger to the position. Burger had first caught Nixon's eye when ''U.S. News and World Report'' had reprinted a 1967 speech that Burger had given at Ripon College. In it, he compared the United States judicial system to those of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark:
:I assume that no one will take issue with me when I say that these North European countries are as enlightened as the United States in the value they place on the individual and on human dignity. [Those countries] do not consider it necessary to use a device like our Fifth Amendment, under which an accused person may not be required to testify. They go swiftly, efficiently and directly to the question of whether the accused is guilty. No nation on earth goes to such lengths or takes such pains to provide safeguards as we do, once an accused person is called before the bar of justice and until his case is completed.
Through speeches like this, Burger became a prominent critic of Chief Justice Earl Warren and argued in favor of a very literal, strict-constructionist reading of the U.S. Constitution. Because of these views, in 1969 President Richard Nixon appointed Burger to succeed Warren, who in turn swore in the new chief on June 23 that year. In his presidential campaign, Nixon had pledged to appoint a strict constructionist as Chief Justice. By coincidence, Burger's first and middle names were the same as the last and first names of Warren.

The Burger Court

When Burger was nominated for the Chief Justiceship, many expected that the Burger Court would rule markedly differently from the Warren Court and might in fact overturn controversial Warren Court precedent. By the early 1970s, however, it became apparent that Burger was not going to turn the clock back on the rulings of the Warren Court and in fact might extend some Warren Court doctrines. The Court issued a unanimous ruling, ''Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education'' (1971) supporting busing to reduce ''de facto'' racial segregation in schools. In ''United States v. U.S. District Court'' (1972) the Burger Court issued another unanimous ruling against the Nixon Administration's desire to invalidate the need for a search warrant and the requirements of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution in cases of domestic surveillance. Then, only two weeks later in ''Furman v. Georgia'' (1972) the court, in a 5-4 decision, invalidated all death penalty laws then in force, although Burger dissented from the decision. In the most controversial ruling of his term, ''Roe v. Wade'' (1973), Burger voted with the majority to recognize a broad right to privacy that prohibited states from banning all abortions.
Burger was a strong opponent of gay rights as he wrote a famous concurring opinion in the Court's 1986 decision upholding a Georgia law criminalizing sodomy (Bowers v. Hardwick), in which Burger purported to marshal historical evidence that laws criminalizing homosexuality were of ancient vintage.
Burger also emphasized the maintenance of checks and balances between the branches of government. On July 24, 1974 he led the court in a unanimous 8-0 decision in ''United States v. Nixon''. This was President Nixon's attempt to keep several memos and tapes relating to the Watergate scandal private. The ongoing scandal caused Nixon to resign in order to avoid impeachment. In the 1983 case of ''Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha'', he held, for the majority, that Congress could not reserve a legislative veto over executive branch actions.
On issues involving criminal law and procedure, Burger remained reliably conservative. He joined the Court majority in voting to reinstate the death penalty in ''Gregg v. Georgia'' (1976), and, in 1983, he vigorously dissented from the Court's holding in the case of ''Solem v. Helm'' that a sentence of life imprisonment for issuing a fraudulent check in the amount of $100 constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
Overall, Burger avoided controversy while in the Court. He often wrote only straightforward and uncontroversial opinions and avoided those in which the court was evenly split. Instead, he poured his energy into the other role of the Chief Justice, administering the nation's legal system. He initiated the National Center for State Courts[1], which is now located in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Institute for Court Management, and National Institute of Corrections to provide professional training for judges, clerks, and prison guards. He initiated the annual ''State of the Judiciary'' speech given by the Chief Justice to the American Bar Association. Some detractors thought his emphasis on the mechanics of the judicial system trivialized the office of Chief Justice.
Burger was the subject of internal controversy on the Supreme Court throughout his tenure. Woodward and Armstrong's ''The Brethren'' depicted Burger as a weak chief justice who was not seriously respected by his colleagues due to alleged personal eccentricity and lack of legal acumen. Woodward and Armstrong's sources indicated that some of the other justices were annoyed by Burger's practice of switching his vote in conference, or simply not announcing his vote, in order that he be able to control opinion assignments.
Burger retired on September 26, 1986, in part to lead the campaign to mark the 1987 bicentennial of the United States Constitution. In 1988, he was awarded the prestigious United States Military Academy's Sylvanus Thayer Award as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 1995 of congestive heart failure at the age of 87 in Washington, D.C. After his death, all of his papers were donated to the College of William and Mary where he formerly served as Chancellor of the College; however, they will not be open to the public until 2026.

Family

He married Elvera Stromberg in 1933. They had two children, Wade Allen Burger and Margaret Elizabeth Burger. His wife died in May 1994.

Trivia

★ In The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, President Nixon recalled that in the spring of 1970 he asked Chief Justice Burger to be prepared to run for President in 1972 if the political repercussions of the Cambodia invasion were too negative for Nixon to endure.

★ According to Richard Nixon's memoirs, Burger was on the short list of vice-presidential replacements for Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1971 and 1973, along with John Connally, Ronald Reagan, and Nelson Rockefeller.

★ As Chief Justice he swore in President Nixon in 1973, President Ford in 1974, President Carter in 1977, and President Reagan in 1981 and 1985.

★ Burger is one of three Supreme Court justices to share a name with a food item (the other two are Felix Frankfurter, Salmon P. Chase). This fact was featured on a "Jaywalking" segment of ''The Tonight Show'' and also in an episode of ''The Simpsons''.

★ He critiqued the National Rifle Association in an 1991 interview on PBS's ''MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour'' by stating that the Second Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud', on the American public".^[1]

See also

★ United States Supreme Court cases during the Burger Court

Notes

1. Biskupic, Joan. "Guns: A Second (Amendment) Look", ''The Washington Post'', 05-10-1995. Retrieved 10-02-2006.

References

★ Bernard Schwartz, ed.; ''The Burger Court: Counter-Revolution or Confirmation?'' Oxford University Press, 1998

★ Linda Greenhouse, ''Nixon Appointee Eased Supreme Court Away from Liberal Era'', ''New York Times,'' June 26, 1995.

★ Linda Greenhouse, ''Becoming Justice Blackmun''

★ Bernard Schwartz, ''A History of the Supreme Court'' Oxford University Press

★ Bob Woodward & Scott Armstrong, ''The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court''