230 Politics and the judiciary
it considered infringed the civil rights of the citizen, in particular sections of
the Nationality Act of 1940 and the Smith Act. In 1965 the Court invalidated
an Act of 1959 which disqualified members of the Communist Party from
becoming officers or employees of a labour union (US v. Brown). The Court
was even more active in striking down state laws and controlling state court
procedures. It ruled that the states may not prescribe prayers in the public
schools (Engel v. Vitale), or Bible readings at the beginning of the school day
(School District v. Schempp). In the 1960s the Supreme Court used the Four-
teenth Amendment to ‘nationalise’ the procedures and safeguards that have
long been applied in the federal courts, by ruling that they must be applied
also in state courts, and applying strict tests to police procedures. Citizens
must be protected against unreasonable search and seizure (Mapp v. Ohio),
against cruel and unusual punishments (Robinson v. California), and must be
provided with counsel by the state if unable to afford it themselves (Gideon v.
Wainwright). These developments culminated in the case of Miranda v. Arizona
in 1966, which applied the procedures to the activities of state police that
the FBI had used in federal cases. The Court asserted the right of an indi-
vidual under interrogation to have a lawyer present, and laid upon the state
the duty of supplying one at state expense if the person under interrogation
could not afford it.
The role of the Court today
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren was undoubtedly responsi-
ble for a greater degree of active judicial policy-making than in any period
other than the New Deal years. Today, in a number of critical policy areas
the courts are still working out the consequences of those decisions. However
in 1969, right at the beginning of his presidency, Richard Nixon had the op-
portunity of nominating a successor to Earl Warren as Chief Justice, and as
a result a much more conservatively minded man was appointed, Warren E.
Burger. Over the next two years three more Nixon nominees were appointed:
Blackmun, Powell and Rehnquist. In 1975 President Ford nominated Justice
John Paul Stevens. No further appointments were made until 1981 when the
first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor,
was nominated by President Reagan.
The radical policies of the Warren Court in the 1950s and 1960s had
been carried through by a group of justices that included two who had been
nominated by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s: Hugo L. Black
and William O. Douglas. The resignation of Earl Warren in 1969, and the
departure from the Court of Black in 1971 and of Douglas in 1975, trans-
formed its approach to constitutional questions. The liberal activist majority
of the Warren Court was replaced by a less cohesive, more cautious group of
justices, without any dominant philosophy of constitutional interpretation.
The Court became much more respectful of the powers and policies of the
federal government, and much less ready to assert its own powers. As Justice
Rehnquist expressed it, in 1981, the Court adopted a ‘healthy deference’ to