Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, Dies

With the confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, Rehnquisthad the five usually conservative votes he needed to put his views of the law into effect. Habeas corpus was further reined in. Affirmative action was subjected to the same degree of constitutional scrutiny as discrimination against minorities.

The Federalist Five, as Rehnquist, O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas came to be known, issued a series of rulings that struck down efforts by Congress to subject state governments to laws protecting women against domestic violence, banning guns near school property and prohibiting discrimination against disabled workers.

To critics, this was an effort to roll back the primacy of national government that had been established by the Union victory in the Civil War. To supporters, the court wasrestoring an appropriate balance of power. But there was no question who the driving force behind the cases was.

"You can't identify anyone who's had more to do with the revival of federalism than Bill Rehnquist," said John C. Jeffries Jr., dean of the University of Virginia Law School. "That means not only limits on federal legislative power, but also that state legislative power ought to be respected."

The same majority voted in 2002 to permit a school tuition voucher program in Cleveland that funneled taxpayer dollars to parochial schools. That opinion, by Rehnquist, embodied an argument that the chief justice had first expressed in a dissenting opinion in 1973.

Rehnquist's support for state autonomy was so strong that it could trump his distaste for things counter-cultural. But this year, when he voted to block a federal override of California's law permitting possession of homegrown medical marijuana possession, he found himself in the minority, abandoned not only by Kennedy but also by Scalia.

With the marijuana case, the federalism drive at the court appears to have stalled out, just as Rehnquist had earlier been thwarted on other key issues when O'Connor, Kennedy or both were not quite prepared to follow his philosophy to its more politically risky conclusions.

The two justices defected to the liberal side in a key 1992 case, with the result that Roe v. Wade was upheld and its status as a constitutional precedent strengthened. In 2003, O'Connor provided the fifth vote to uphold affirmative action in university admissions, with Rehnquist writing a biting dissent.

Generally, though, as chief justice, Rehnquist made less frequent use of the luxury of principled disagreement with his colleagues than he had as an associate. When it was clear that most justices opposed one of his long-held positions, he would sometimes join the majority and assign the opinion-writing to himself -- a prerogative of the chief justice -- in order to limit what he saw as the damage.

Thus, when the court voted 7-2 to uphold the Miranda decision in 2000, Rehnquist wrote the opinion, a rather grudging acknowledgment of Miranda 's status as unchangeable precedent; Scalia and Thomas dissented.

In 2003, O'Connor declined to invalidate provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act that subjected the states to private lawsuits for alleged failures to treat their male and female workers equally in granting time off.

Rehnquist assigned the case to himself, supplying a bare-bones opinion that reiterated many of the court's past federalism principles even as it explained why they did not apply in the context of a law against gender discrimination in employment. The alternative was to dissent and leave the majority opinion to the liberal Stevens.

"He became a bit more muted and focused" as chief justice, said Dennis J. Hutchinson, a professor of law and history at the University of Chicago. "He grew into a very savvy operator."

Though still ideologically unreconstructed in almost every respect, as chief justice Rehnquist came to acknowledge, and appreciate, the limits the law itself places on any individual's ability to alter the court's direction.

Asked by Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2001 whether his esteem for Warren had grown, Rehnquist said that it "probably did, partly out of respect for stare decisis . That is the principle that once an issue has been decided, it should stay decided. You can't constantly be relitigating things without doing a lot more damage than just leaving them in place."

Rehnquist was survived by his three children, James Rehnquist of Boston, Nancy Spears of Middleburg, Vt., and Janet Rehnquist of Arlington, who were at his side when he died last night, Arberg said.