South Carolina v. Katzenbach

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The majority opinion in South Carolina v. Katzenbach was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. He was joined in this majority by seven of his colleagues. One justice, Hugo L. Black, concurred as to the bulk of the opinion but dissented as to those sections upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Warren had been appointed as chief justice in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. A former state attorney general and governor of California, Warren had the reputation of being a fundamentally conservative, yet bipartisan Republican politician. Once on the Court, however, Warren swung quickly to the left on such key civil rights and liberties issues as school desegregation, the rights of the accused, and freedom of religion. He was joined in this shift by a majority of his brethren on the bench. Hence, by the time he wrote the opinion in South Carolina v. Katzenbach, Warren (who would retire in 1969) and the Court were approaching the end of a period of sweeping judicial activity that had transformed the constitutional status of individual civil rights and liberties in America.

The dissenting justice, Hugo Black, served on the Supreme Court for thirty-four years (1937–1971). Appointed to the Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Black’s judicial philosophy centered on a close textual reading of the U.S. Constitution, a reading that stressed the idea that the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights were “incorporated” on the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. While this belief led Black to be a leader in the Warren Court’s expansion of civil liberties and rights in most instances, in certain cases, such as Katzenbach, it pushed Black to oppose legislation that he felt exceeded the textual reach of the Constitution. As Black explained in his Katzenbach dissent, he saw “no reason to read into the Constitution meanings it did not have when it was adopted and which have not been put into it since.”