80 Facts About William Rehnquist

William Hubbs Rehnquist was an American attorney and jurist who served on the US Supreme Court for 33 years, first as an associate justice from 1972 to 1986 and then as the 16th chief justice from 1986 until his death in 2005.

William Rehnquist grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and served in the US Army Air Forces during the final years of World War II.

William Rehnquist served as a legal adviser for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in the 1964 US presidential election, and President Richard Nixon appointed him US Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel in 1969.

In 1971, Nixon nominated William Rehnquist to succeed Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan II, and the US Senate confirmed him that year.

William Rehnquist quickly established himself as the Burger Court's most conservative member.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated William Rehnquist to succeed retiring Chief Justice Warren Burger, and the Senate confirmed him.

William Rehnquist served as Chief Justice for nearly 19 years, making him the fourth-longest-serving chief justice and the eighth-longest-serving justice overall.

William Rehnquist became an intellectual and social leader of the Rehnquist Court, earning respect even from the justices who frequently opposed his opinions.

William Rehnquist opposed Roe v Wade and continued to argue that Roe had been incorrectly decided in Planned Parenthood v Casey.

William Rehnquist was born on October 1,1924, and grew up in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood.

William Rehnquist attended Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, for one quarter in the fall of 1942 before enlisting in the US Army Air Forces, the predecessor of the US Air Force.

William Rehnquist served from 1943 to 1946, mostly in assignments in the United States.

William Rehnquist was put into a pre-meteorology program and assigned to Denison University until February 1944, when the program was shut down.

William Rehnquist served three months at Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma City, three months in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and then went to Hondo, Texas, for a few months.

William Rehnquist was then chosen for another training program, which began at Chanute Field, Illinois, and ended at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

William Rehnquist graduated in 1948 with Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in political science and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

William Rehnquist did graduate study in government at Harvard University, where he received another Master of Arts in 1950.

William Rehnquist then returned to Stanford to attend the Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the Stanford Law Review.

William Rehnquist was strongly conservative from an early age and wrote that he "hated" liberal Justice Hugo Black in his diary at Stanford.

William Rehnquist graduated in 1952 ranked first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws.

William Rehnquist was in the same class at Stanford Law as Sandra Day O'Connor, with whom he would later serve on the Supreme Court.

In both his 1971 United States Senate confirmation hearing for associate justice and his 1986 hearing for chief justice, William Rehnquist testified that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views rather than his own.

Nevertheless, William Rehnquist recommended to Jackson that the Supreme Court should agree to hear Terry.

William Rehnquist began his legal work in the firm of Denison Kitchel, subsequently serving as the national manager of Barry M Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign.

William Rehnquist denied the charges, and Vincent Maggiore, then chairman of the Phoenix-area Democratic Party, said he had never heard any negative reports about William Rehnquist's Election Day activities.

When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, William Rehnquist returned to work in Washington.

William Rehnquist served as Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1969 to 1971.

William Rehnquist played a role in the investigation of Justice Abe Fortas for accepting $20,000 from Louis Wolfson, a financier under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

For years, William Rehnquist was determined to keep cases involving individual rights in state courts out of federal reach.

William Rehnquist believed the Court "had no business reflecting society's changing and expanding values" and that this was Congress's domain.

William Rehnquist expressed his views about the Equal Protection Clause in cases like Trimble v Gordon:.

William Rehnquist held a restrictive view of criminals' and prisoners' rights and believed capital punishment to be constitutional.

William Rehnquist supported the view that the Fourth Amendment permitted a warrantless search incident to a valid arrest.

In Nixon v Administrator of General Services, Rehnquist dissented from a decision upholding the constitutionality of an act that gave a federal agency administrator certain authority over former President Nixon's presidential papers and tape recordings.

William Rehnquist dissented solely on the ground that the law was "a clear violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers".

Harvard University law professor David Shapiro wrote that as an associate justice, William Rehnquist disliked even minimal inquiries into legislative objectives except in the areas of race, national origin, and infringement of specific constitutional guarantees.

In 1978, Shapiro pointed out that Rehnquist had avoided joining rational basis determinations for years, except in one case, Weinberger v Wiesenfeld.

In Trimble v Gordon, Rehnquist eschewed the majority's approach to equal protection, writing in dissent that the state's distinction should be sustained because it was not "mindless and patently irrational".

Shapiro alleges that William Rehnquist's stance "makes rational basis a virtual nullity".

William Rehnquist developed warm personal relations with his colleagues, even with ideological opposites.

William Rehnquist had a tense relationship with Marshall, who sometimes accused him of bigotry.

William Rehnquist usually voted with Chief Justice Warren Burger, and, recognizing "the importance of his relationship with Burger", often went along to get along, joining Burger's majority opinions even when he disagreed with them, and, in important cases, "tr[ying] to straighten him out".

William Rehnquist had no prior experience as a judge upon his appointment to the Court.

William Rehnquist ruled for the plaintiffs in a number of motions, allowing the case to go to the jury.

Forty-three days after William Rehnquist was sworn in as chief justice, the Fourth Circuit reversed the judgment, overruling William Rehnquist, and concluding that there was insufficient evidence to have sent the matter to the jury.

William Rehnquist tightened up the justices' conferences, keeping justices from going too long or off track and not allowing any justice to speak twice until each had spoken once, and gained a reputation for scrupulous fairness in assigning opinions: William Rehnquist assigned no justice two opinions before everyone had been assigned one, and made no attempts to interfere with assignments for cases in which he was in the minority.

William Rehnquist added four yellow stripes to the sleeves of his robe in 1995.

Scholars expected William Rehnquist to push the Supreme Court in a more conservative direction during his tenure.

In both cases, William Rehnquist was in the majority that held discrimination by states based upon age or disability need satisfy only rational basis review as opposed to strict scrutiny.

William Rehnquist agreed with Kennedy's statement that such lawsuits were not "necessary and proper":.

William Rehnquist led the Court toward a more limited view of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause.

William Rehnquist's broad reading of Congress's spending power was seen as a major limitation on the William Rehnquist Court's push to redistribute power from the federal government to the states.

William Rehnquist believed that federal judges should not impose their personal views on the law or stray beyond the framers' intent by reading broad meaning into the Constitution; he saw himself as an "apostle of judicial restraint".

Dissenting in Casey, William Rehnquist criticized the Court's "newly minted variation on stare decisis", and asserted "that Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases".

William Rehnquist joined Scalia's dissent, which argued that since the Constitution says nothing about this subject, "it is left to be resolved by normal democratic means".

In 1992, Rehnquist joined a dissenting opinion in Lee v Weisman arguing that the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment only forbids government from preferring one particular religion over another.

In Van Orden v Perry, Rehnquist wrote the plurality opinion upholding the constitutionality of a display of the Ten Commandments at the Texas state capitol in Austin.

University of Chicago Law School Professor Geoffrey Stone has written that William Rehnquist was by an impressive margin the justice least likely to invalidate a law as violating "the freedom of speech, or of the press".

But, as he did in Bigelow v Commonwealth of Virginia, Rehnquist voted against freedom of advertising if an advertisement involved birth control or abortion.

William Rehnquist wrote a concurrence agreeing to strike down the male-only admissions policy of the Virginia Military Institute as violating the Equal Protection Clause, but declined to join the majority opinion's basis for using the Fourteenth Amendment, writing:.

William Rehnquist remained skeptical about the Court's Equal Protection Clause jurisprudence; some of his opinions most favorable to equality resulted from statutory rather than constitutional interpretation.

In 2000, Rehnquist wrote a concurring opinion in Bush v Gore, the case that ended the presidential election controversy in Florida, agreeing with four other justices that the Equal Protection Clause barred the "standardless" manual recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court.

In 1999, Rehnquist became the second chief justice to preside over a presidential impeachment trial, during the proceedings against President Bill Clinton.

In truth, William Rehnquist carefully staked out a limbo between the right and the left and showed that it was a very good place to be.

William Rehnquist noted that, as a private citizen, Rehnquist had protested Brown v Board of Education, and as a justice, consistently ruled against racial minorities in affirmative action cases.

The files reveal that for a period, William Rehnquist had been addicted to Placidyl, a drug widely prescribed for insomnia.

On December 27,1981, William Rehnquist entered George Washington University Hospital for treatment of back pain and Placidyl dependency.

For several weeks before his hospitalization, William Rehnquist had slurred his words, but there were no indications he was otherwise impaired.

On October 26,2004, the Supreme Court press office announced that William Rehnquist had recently been diagnosed with anaplastic thyroid cancer.

William Rehnquist arrived using a cane, walked very slowly, and left immediately after the oath was administered.

William Rehnquist missed 44 oral arguments before the Court in late 2004 and early 2005, returning to the bench on March 21,2005.

On July 1,2005, Justice O'Connor announced her impending retirement from the Court after consulting with William Rehnquist and learning that he had no intention to retire.

William Rehnquist died at his Arlington, Virginia, home on September 3,2005, four weeks before his 81st birthday.

William Rehnquist was the first justice to die in office since Robert H Jackson in 1954 and the first chief justice to die in office since Fred M Vinson in 1953.

William Rehnquist was the last serving justice appointed by Nixon.

William Rehnquist's grandfather Olof Andersson, who changed his surname from the patronymic Andersson to the family name Rehnquist, was born in the province of Varmland; his grandmother was born Adolfina Ternberg in the Vreta Kloster parish in Ostergotland.

William Rehnquist is one of two chief justices of Swedish descent, the other being Earl Warren, who had Norwegian and Swedish ancestry.

Nan William Rehnquist died on October 17,1991, aged 62, of ovarian cancer.

Mr William Rehnquist has said he was unaware of discriminatory restrictions on properties he bought in Arizona and Vermont, and officials in those states said today that he had never even been required to sign the deeds that contained the restrictions.

William Rehnquist told the committee he would act quickly to get rid of the covenants.