William Rehnquist

Biography

William Rehnquist was born in Milwaukee in 1924 and grew up in suburban Shorewood. After one term at Kenyon College he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, serving from 1943 to 1946, mostly in the United States and finally as a weather observer in North Africa. On the G.I. Bill he studied political science at Stanford, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in 1948, took a second master's at Harvard in 1950, and graduated first in his class from Stanford Law School in 1952.

He clerked for Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952 and 1953, writing a memorandum that defended Plessy v. Ferguson while the Court considered the school segregation cases, and then practised law in Phoenix from 1953 to 1969. Active in Arizona Republican politics, he advised Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. Under Richard Nixon he headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel as an assistant attorney general from 1969 to 1971.

Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1971, and he took his seat as an associate justice in January 1972 after confirmation hearings in which his civil rights record was questioned. He quickly became the Burger Court's most conservative member and dissented in Roe v. Wade. In 1986 Ronald Reagan named him to succeed Warren Burger as chief justice.

As chief justice from 1986 to 2005 he led a court that narrowed federal power in favour of the states, writing the majority opinions in United States v. Lopez and United States v. Morrison, which limited Congress's use of the Commerce Clause. He presided over the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1999 and joined the majority in Bush v. Gore in 2000. He died in office in September 2005.