William Rehnquist: William Rehnquist, who has died of cancer aged 80, became America's chief justice amid a storm of controversy.
When president Ronald Reagan nominated him in 1986, Rehnquist had already spent 14 years as one of the supreme court's eight associate justices.
During that time he had emerged as one of its most conservative voices. His judgments repeatedly tried to limit what he viewed as the unconstitutional activism of his liberal predecessors who, under chief justice Earl Warren, had transformed America's legal and social climate.
Rehnquist was nominated by president Richard Nixon in 1971 to replace Justice John Harlan and from the start it became evident that he was out of tune with his fellow justices. Taking his seat the next year, the split emerged within weeks, when he became one of two dissentients to the historic 1973 Roe v Wade judgment, which legalised abortion throughout America.
His dissent was determined by an extremely narrow interpretation of the 14th amendment. This amendment, passed in the aftermath of the civil war, decrees that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States". Rehnquist argued that, since many state anti-abortion laws were already in place when the amendment was adopted in 1868, they had been implicitly accepted by the ratifying legislatures and the appellant, "Jane Roe", therefore had no case.
This issue lies at the heart of American jurisprudence, riven from the beginning over the power of the federal government against that of individual states. Rehnquist, like other conservatives, favoured a highly restrictive view of the 10th amendment - the final provision of the bill of rights that states that "powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people". This battle around states' rights informed Rehnquist's whole judicial career.
Rehnquist came late to the law. He grew up in the middle-class suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in a strongly Republican household. He was 16 when the US joined the second World War and, as soon as he could, abandoned high school to join the air force. Having served in its meteorological service in north Africa, he went to Stanford University with the help of the government grant given to all ex-servicemen. He was an outstanding student and, having gained a master's degree in political science, he went to Harvard to earn another in government.
These successive studies sparked an interest in the law and in 1950 he returned to Stanford for yet another degree. After two years he graduated at the top of his law class and acquired one of the plum assignments available to America's brightest law graduates - working for a supreme court justice. He was recruited to the chambers of Justice Robert Jackson, a notable liberal who had acted as America's chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of leading Nazis.
Years later, when Rehnquist was nominated as chief justice, his work for Jackson caused a major controversy. In circumstances that never became clear, the young lawyer had, in 1953, written a background paper dealing with a landmark case then before the court, Brown v the Board of Education, which eventually overturned the segregated education of white and black children.
Rehnquist's memorandum strongly supported the stance taken by the court in 1896, that established the principle of "separate but equal" facilities for whites and blacks. "It is about time," he wrote, "the court faced the fact that the white people in the south don't like coloured people; the constitution restrains them from effecting this dislike through state action, but it most assuredly did not appoint the court as a sociological watchdog . . . "
When this document surfaced at Rehnquist's confirmation hearing it caused an uproar. There was an even greater fuss when he told senators he had only written it to express Justice Jackson's own views, a claim fiercely challenged by other lawyers who had worked closely with the judge. In the end, senators confirmed Rehnquist's nomination by 65 to 33, but the hostile vote (which included some Republicans) was the largest ever recorded against any supreme court appointee.
In part this resistance stemmed from the political record Rehnquist amassed after he moved to work for a legal practice in Arizona. There he became heavily involved in Republican politics, attaching himself firmly to the ultra-conservative Senator Barry Goldwater and battling vigorously against such local social proposals as racially integrated schools.
One of Rehnquist's close associates there was Richard Kleindienst, who became president Nixon's assistant attorney general and was later convicted for contempt of Congress in the Watergate scandal. Kleindienst recruited Rehnquist into the administration's office of legal counsel, where he gained a fearsome reputation as the department's most ardent advocate of wire-tapping, government surveillance and preventive detention.
He also compiled a constitutional amendment (subsequently abandoned) to outlaw school busing (mandated by federal courts to speed up desegregation).
Rehnquist's close involvement with Nixon's measures to deter anti-Vietnam war demonstrations also caused him problems when he joined the supreme court. At the justice department he had backed the army's intimidating surveillance of protesters and had publicly decried the legal action that civil liberty groups had launched against the practice.
By the time the case reached the supreme court in 1972, Rehnquist was sitting on the bench and refused to withdraw from the case. When the court ruled against the protesters by 5-4 - in other words by Rehnquist's casting vote - there was another uproar. The New York Times attacked him for impropriety and 110 law professors signed a letter accusing him of unethical behaviour. It was water off a duck's back: as the years went by, a succession of supreme court judgments emerged which had been signed by all the justices except Rehnquist. As these 8-1 decisions mounted, Rehnquist became known to the more irreverent court clerks as the Lone Ranger.
In many cases his dissent was based on the 10th amendment and the right of states to determine their own affairs. Rehnquist also tried repeatedly to restrict the widened application of the 14th amendment, arguing that it must be strictly applied to the racial discrimination that had brought it into being.
In successive cases, he voted in favour not only of states' rights, capital punishment and school prayers, but against abortion and affirmative action. When Chief Justice Warren Burger retired in 1986, after a mediocre 17 years in charge of the court, president Reagan was looking for what he described as a strict constructionist to replace him. He settled on Rehnquist as someone who "understood that government by the people requires judicial restraint". As has so often happened, however, things did not evolve quite as the president intended.
Though he remained deeply conservative, Rehnquist became increasingly concerned to persuade fellow justices into compromise rulings over a wide range of cases. On a bench that was split between conservatives and liberals, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor became the court's key figure. As a judicial centrist she emerged as the swing vote, enabling Rehnquist to secure a succession of 5-4 rulings.
In his later years the chief justice's own rate of dissent declined dramatically: by 2003 he was only in the minority for eight of that session's 71 judgments. By contrast, the court's most conservative member, Clarence Thomas, racked up 21 dissents.
This shift was dramatically highlighted when Rehnquist handed down an opinion reaffirming the court's controversial Miranda judgment of 1966 (which requires police officers to inform all arrestees of their legal rights). He had previously been a staunch opponent.
In 1998, when president Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury by the House of Representatives (and subsequently acquitted), Rehnquist became only the second chief justice in American history to preside over a Senate trial of the nation's chief executive. More controversially, he was later one of the five republican-appointed justices who decided in December 2000 that George Bush had won an electoral college majority in the presidential election, though he was well behind the Democrats' candidate, Al Gore, in the popular vote.
In private Rehnquist was a witty and engaging man. He successfully reformed the supreme court's archaic internal procedures and campaigned repeatedly to end the Senate's habit of scoring partisan political points by delaying federal judicial appointments. His wife, Natalie, died in 1991. He is survived by a son and two daughters.
William Hubbs Rehnquist, born October 1st, 1924; died September 3rd, 2005 .
Profile of nominated successor John Roberts: Weekend section