United States v. Lopez

About the Author

As chief justice of the United States, William Hubbs Rehnquist oversaw the Supreme Court's profound shift in a conservative direction after the more liberal leadership of his predecessor, Warren Burger. Rehnquist was born on October 1, 1924, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1946, he attended Stanford University in California, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in political science. After two years at Harvard University, where he earned a second master's degree in government in 1950, he returned to Stanford to attend law school. There he graduated first in his class in 1952; one of his classmates was his future Supreme Court colleague Sandra Day O'Connor.

After serving as a judicial clerk for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson during the Court's 1952–1953 term, Rehnquist settled in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked at a law firm and became active in Republican Party politics. From 1969 to 1971 he was assistant attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. In 1971 President Richard Nixon nominated him for a seat on the Supreme Court; after confirmation by the Senate, Rehnquist assumed his seat in 1972. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the position of chief justice, a position he held, despite ill health in his later years, until his death on September 3, 2005.

As a member of the nation's highest court, Rehnquist wrote primarily decisions in which he explained the legal principles and reasoning that had led to the decision. This type of legal writing requires the justice to outline the facts of the case, cite statutes and legal precedents (previous court decisions) that have a bearing on the case, and then demonstrate how those statutes and precedents should be used to decide the case at hand. Typically, when the Supreme Court arrives at a decision, the chief justice assigns the task of writing the Court's decision to one of the justices who joined the majority, though the chief justice has often reserved that task for himself. In the case of such key Court decisions as United States v. Lopez and George W. Bush et al. v. Albert Gore, Jr., et al., Rehnquist himself wrote the decisions. Often, however, justices who do not join with the majority and disagree with the Court's decision file a dissent outlining the basis of their disagreement. In the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, Rehnquist disagreed with the majority and wrote such a dissent.