Background
Warren Earl Burger was born on September 17, 1907, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Charles Joseph Burger and Katharine Schnittger Burger. Burger’s father worked as a rail cargo inspector and, occasionally, as a salesman.
Warren Earl Burger was born on September 17, 1907, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Charles Joseph Burger and Katharine Schnittger Burger. Burger’s father worked as a rail cargo inspector and, occasionally, as a salesman.
After graduating from John A. Johnson High School in St. Paul, Burger won a scholarship to Princeton University, but not one sufficient to cover his financial needs. Instead of Princeton, Burger enrolled in night classes at the University of Minnesota in 1925, supporting himself by selling insurance during the day. He continued his insurance job when he began taking night courses at St. Paul College of Law (later to become the William Mitchell College of Law) in 1927. Four years later he graduated magna cum laude and was admitted to the Minnesota bar.
After law school Burger joined the firm of Boyesen, Otis & Farley in St. Paul while con tinuing his relationship with the St. Paul College of Law by teaching contract law as an adjunct professor. In 1933 he married Elvera Stromberg, and the couple eventually had two children. Burger applied the same work ethic that had seen him through college and law school to his legal practice, focusing on corporate, real estate, and probate work with energy and success sufficient to see him soon made a partner in his firm. He plunged into civic and political affairs with equal zeal, serving as president of St. Paul’s Junior Chamber of Commerce and helping to organize St. Paul’s Council on Human Relations, which sought to combat racial discrimination. Burger also supported the political aspirations of Harold E. Stassen, who was elected the Republican governor of Minnesota in 1938 at the age of 31. Burger followed Stassen onto the national political stage, serving as Stassen’s floor manager during the Republican national convention of 1952 and helping to orchestrate the decision of Minnesota Republicans to eventually cast their lot with Dwight D. Eisenhower as the Republican candidate for president.
After Eisenhower won the general election, he rewarded Burger’s support by naming him assistant attorney general for the Claims Division of the Department of Justice (later to become the Civil Division) in 1953. In this position, Burger found himself in charge of the federal government’s civil cases. But Eisenhower soon found another place for Burger when a vacancy appeared on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1956. In his 13 years on the federal appeals court, Burger established a reputation as a moderately conservative judge, hostile to the revolutionary changes then being accomplished on behalf of the rights of criminal defendants by the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the man whose seat Burger would one day occupy.
Toward the end of the 1960s, Earl Warren privately disclosed his intent to resign from the Court to President Lyndon B. Johnson, as he wanted to give Johnson the opportunity of naming his replacement. Johnson promptly attempted to elevate his friend, Associate Justice Abe Fortas, to the Court’s chief seat. But the plan backfired when Republican opposition, fu¬eled by die discovery that Fortas had engaged in a questionable financial arrangement after joining the Court, ultimately forced Johnson to withdraw Fortas’s nomination without enough time remaining in his presidency to find a replacement. The chance to appoint Warren’s successor thus fell to President Richard M. Nixon. Nixon, like Burger, opposed the Warren court’s activism in the protection of the rights of criminal defendants. Burger’s moderate conservativism, his harmony with the president on the issue of criminal procedure, and his 13 years of experience on the federal bench therefore combined to make him Nixon’s choice for chief justice. Nixon announced his nomination of Burger as chief justice on May 21, 1969, and the Senate confirmed the appointment two weeks later by a vote of 74-3.
The chief justice of the Supreme Court not only manages the work of the Court but also serves as the administrative head of the entire federal judicial system. In the latter capacity, Burger proved to be an energetic administrator, and he used his position to encourage reforms in the administration of state as well as federal courts. He helped to establish the Institute for Court Management and the National Center for State Courts. With a sometimes critical eye, Burger also focused his attention on the legal profession at large, and he encouraged the creation of the American Inns of Court, an organization of local chapters dedicated to encouraging standards of professionalism and excellence among lawyers.
After 17 years as chief justice, Warren Burger resigned from the Court on September 26, 1986. For the next six years he served as chairman of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution and as chancellor of the College of William and Mary from 1986 to 1993.
Whatever counterrevolution Nixon may have imagined that Burger would launch against the activism of the Warren years never appeared. In the area of constitutional protections for criminal defendants, for example, the highwater mark of the Warren court’s constitutional revolution was represented by a trilogy of cases: Mapp v. Ohio (1961), which prohibited states from using evidence from illegal searches or seizures in the prosecution of criminal defendants; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which guaranteed a state criminal defendant an attorney at the state’s expense in serious criminal cases; and Miranda v. Arizona (1963), which required police to advise suspects of their right to remain silent and to have counsel appointed for them. Burger’s court never overruled these precedents, and they remain valid into the 21st century.
In other areas of constitutional law, the Burger court actually expanded on key elements of the Warren court revolution. Where the Warren court had applied the constitutional requirement of equal protection to begin the eradication of racial discrimination from American society, the Burger court extended the protection of the equal protection clause to other forms of discrimination. Burger, for example, wrote the opinion for die Court in Reed v. Reed (1971), which was the first decision in the Court’s history to declare discrimination on the grounds of gender unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. The Burger court also reinforced the principle of church-state separation that had been made emphatic by the Warren court’s decisions in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), declaring state-sponsored prayers and Bible readings in public schools unconstitutional. Burger, again, wrote the Court’s opinion in Lemon v. Kurtz- man (1974), which found unconstitutional a variety of state aid to parochial schools. Most controversially, the Burger court expanded the right of privacy recognized by the Warren court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) as protecting the right of married couples to use contraceptives to include the right of women to have an abortion in Roev. Wade (1973).
The increasing conservativism of the Burger court, though it proved unable to repudiate wholesale the legacy of the Warren court, nevertheless managed to limit the force ol this legacy in some cases. While not abandoning Mapp v. Ohio's rule requiring the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence in criminal proceedings, for example, the Burger court made it easier for law enforcement personnel to search for and seize evidence. Similarly, Burger created an important exception to previously established principles of church-state separation when he declared for the Court in Marsh v. Chambers (1984) that the First Amendment’s establishment clause did not forbid a state from opening legislative sessions with prayer.
Perhaps the greatest irony of President Nixon’s hoped-for constitutional counterrevolution was Burger’s opinion for the Court in United States v. Nixon (1974). In this case, Nixon found himself personally the subject of a historic constitutional dispute when he atempted to resist a subpoena directing him to produce secretly recorded White House tapes that eventually implicated him in the Watergate controversy. Nixon’s claim that he should not have to turn over the tapes fell on the stony ears of the Burger court, and Burger himself announced the Court’s opinion requiring Nixon to produce the tapes. Three weeks after this court order, Nixon resigned the presidency.
In 1933 he married Elvera Stromberg, and the couple eventually had two children.