Young Mr. Rehnquist's Theory of Moral Rights - Mostly Observed (Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Legacy of Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice O'connor‪)‬

INTRODUCTION William Rehnquist had so long and effectively played the role of fair-minded Chief Justice--his ideological opposite William Brennan calling him "the best chief under whom [he] served" (1)--that sometimes his substantive legacy is overlooked. (2) It should not be. Coming to the Court in 1972 from the Office of Legal Counsel, (3) he began as a lone dissenter, but by the time of his death in 2005, he had brought at least a slim majority of the Court around to his own thinking. (4) His jurisprudential perspective emphasized a government of enumerated and separated power, where state and local authority was respected, and the judiciary reserved its authority to a historically faithful understanding of the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. (5)