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Today in History: Chief Justice Earl Warren Is Born
03/19/10
Earl Warren, the 14th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was born in Los Angeles on March 19, 1891. After being elected to three terms as governor of California, Warren was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower believed that Warren would be a conservative-to-moderate chief justice. Instead, he left a legacy of liberal rulings that made him one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century.
During Warren’s 15-year tenure, the Court handed down a number of landmark decisions on such issues as racial segregation, civil rights, police procedure, and the separation of church and state. Warren is probably best remembered as the author of the Court’s unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared the practice of segregating children by race in the nation’s public schools to be unconstitutional. He also wrote the 5-4 majority opinion in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required law enforcement officers to inform suspects of their rights to remain silent and have an attorney present during questioning.
In 1963 Warren was appointed chairman of the commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1964 the controversial Warren Commission Report concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy. Upon his retirement in 1969, Warren was hailed by liberals for using the power of the judiciary to promote progressive social change. Conservatives, on the other hand, criticized him for what they viewed as his judicial activism and broad interpretation of the Constitution. Warren died in 1974.