Social Justice and the Warren Court: A Preliminary Examination

Whether courts should attempt to advance social justice is a much debated topic in American jurisprudence. The conventional wisdom about the judicial process is to the contrary. In this article, Professor Arthur S. Miller suggests that the Supreme Court\u27s innovative civil rights and civil liberties decisions during Chief Justice Earl Warren\u27s tenure had the ultimate effect of helping to preserve the status quo of the social order. Its decisions, coming at a time of economic abundance, were a means of siphoning off discontent from disadvantaged groups at minimum social cost to the established order. The activist decisions under Warren were thus of a profoundly conservative nature. Using a recent biography of Chief Justice Warren as a point of departure, Professor Miller\u27s analysis is a provocative examination of the Supreme Court\u27s work during the years of 1953 to 1969