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98 Va. L. Rev. Brief 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/inbrf98 and id is 1 raw text is: VIRGINIA LAW REVIEW IN BRIEF VOLUME 98 APRIL 2012 PAGES 1-13 NOW WE ARE SIX: THE EMERGING ROBERTS COURT* A. E. Dick Howard** T HE Roberts Court has now completed its sixth year. This bench- mark invites comparisons with earlier Courts. Earl Warren was ap- pointed as Chief Justice in 1953. It was not until nine years later, in 1962, that the Warren Court fully emerged. That was the year in which Felix Frankfurter left the Court, Arthur Goldberg took his place, and the balance on the Court tipped to the more liberal justices. Opinions from the mid-sixties-Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964) come to mind-mark the Warren Court at flood tide.' William Rehnquist was confirmed as Chief Justice in 1986. Again, it was about nine years, in 1995, before the Rehnquist Court emerged full blown. Rehnquist, so often a lone dissenter before 1986, now had com- pany in the likes of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Thus, in the mid-nineties, the Rehnquist Court was making its distinctive mark on the Court's jurisprudence. Illustrative are United States v. Lopez (1995), the first time in sixty years that the Court had declared an act of Con- gress to be beyond that body's power to regulate commerce, and Agosti- ni v. Felton (1997), one of a series of cases in which the increasingly * Fans of Winnie the Pooh and other A. A. Milne characters will recognize the title's hav- ini been drawn from Milne's Now We Are Six. * White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs, University of Virginia. I wish to acknowledge helpful comments and assistance from Megan Coker, Katherine Mims Crocker, Matthew Glover, Paige Nichols, and Robert Wai Wong, members of an informal seminar on the Supreme Court. This essay was developed from remarks made in September 2011 at the University of Virginia's Supreme Court Roundup reviewing the Court's 2010-11 Term. Gideon v. Wainwright. 372 U.S. 335 (1963): Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).

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