Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist Dies

Key Warren court rulings -- among them the ban on school prayer and the Miranda case guaranteeing a suspect's "right to remain silent" -- have survived. And the post-Warren Roe v. Wade decision, the abortion rights ruling that Rehnquist tried to overturn, also seems entrenched, for now.

Yet the Rehnquist court has strengthened the legal position of the police, paved the way for swifter executions, defined constitutional limits on federal power and permitted indirect government funding of religious schools.

Although Rehnquist and his fellow conservative justices often acted in the name of judicial restraint, it is perhaps more accurate to say that they showed an active court could serve conservative policy ends as well as liberal ones.

During Rehnquist's tenure, the Supreme Court has arguably expanded its role in American life, frequently striking down laws passed by Congress, subjecting the president to independent counsel investigations and private lawsuits and, in 2000, settling a presidential election.

Although the full scope of the Rehnquist counterrevolution is still much debated, legal scholars already rank him among the court's great chief justices.

"When the history of the Supreme Court in the 20th century is written, there will be two great chief justices: Earl Warren and William Rehnquist," said Mark Tushnet, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. "Both presided over courts that changed the law in a very dramatic way."

Still, as his tenure concluded, there was a sense at the court that Rehnquist's most influential days were already behind him. In recent terms, he suffered defeats on issues he cares deeply about, such as affirmative action in university admissions, which the court sustained, and state sovereignty and individual property rights, which it curbed. He cast a vote but expressed no written opinion in the court's historic decision last year granting federal court access to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

His impact has been blunted by his inability to win over the court's vital center, as represented by fellow Republican appointees Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy.

Yet, as Tushnet points out, the remarkable fact is that Rehnquist even came close.

"When he started, the law was tilted in a liberal direction," Tushnet added. "Now it's not really tilted in a conservative direction, but it's more of a level playing field."

Rehnquist was born on Oct. 1, 1924, in Milwaukee and grew up in the suburb of Shorewood, Wis., where he attended the local public schools. When a grade-school teacher asked him what he was going to do when he grew up, the loyal son of anti-New Deal parents did not hesitate: "I'm going to change the government," he said.

He started his college education at Kenyon College in Ohio in 1942 but was drafted in March 1943. He worked as a weather forecaster for the U.S. Army Air Forces at bases in the Southwestern United States and North Africa. He would later say that his time in these warm, dry climates convinced him to settle in Arizona as a young adult.