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Bar News - September 17, 2004 US Supreme Court No Longer 'Rehnquist Court' By: Dan Wise & Deborah A. Fauver LINDA GREENHOUSE, a senior writer for The New York Times, shared a quarter-century's worth of perspective on the US Supreme Court at the John W. King Memorial Lecture, held at the NH Supreme Court on Sept. 7. Greenhouse was introduced by Chief Justice John T. Broderick, Jr., who lauded Greenhouse's ability to analyze and explain in a matter of hours the opinions that appellate judges take weeks to craft. Her career, marked by a 1998 Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting, also included one end-of-term week in which she analyzed and explained 10 major opinions-resulting in five page-one articles in the Times -"no place to be inexact," Broderick remarked.  The featured speaker of the NH Supreme Court's John W. King Memorial Lecture on Sept. 7 was Linda Greenhouse, who spoke about the High Court from her perspective as The New York Times' Supreme Court correspondent for more than 25 years. Pictured at the reception before her talk are (left to right) Greenhouse, Rep. Sheila T. Francoeur, of Hampton, Chief Justice John T. Broderick, Jr., and Senate President Thomas R. Eaton, of Keene. A capacity audience, that included US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, listened intently as Greenhouse provided a sweeping overview of the court's evolution, buttressed with detailed descriptions of key cases that illustrate what she called a "noticeable new dynamic" at the Court. In several of the cited cases, involving IOLTA, the Family and Medical Leave Act, affirmative action, and gay rights, the Court had received a record number of amicus briefs, Greenhouse said. It was clear to her that the members of the Court had reviewed a good sampling of those briefs, and that the resulting opinions were, in part, a result of the justices' own sense that the culture had changed. Greenhouse briefly discussed the court's recent rejection of Bush Administration arguments regarding the detention of terrorism suspects and enemy combatants, and said the court's upcoming term "is a period analogous to the period preceding Brown v. Board of Education...great principles have been launched but have not yet landed." "This is a time when the Court is not so much reexamining first principles, but debating how far to carry those principles," the Times reporter said. Speaking more generally of the court's direction, she said that even though the court's membership has been extraordinarily stable-it has not seen a retirement for 10 years-it is continuing to evolve and is moving away from the conservative, state-rights approach of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. She cited several cases from the 2002 term, both obscure and prominent-to demonstrate that an evolving majority of the court has been moving toward greater support for federalism and ruling against state immunity and also becoming more pragmatic and less doctrinal. "Not every idea has to be followed over the cliff to its logical conclusion," she said. "The center of gravity has shifted from doctrinal perfection to making sense in the real world." Greenhouse spent the summer working on a biography of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, whose papers became available this spring on the fifth anniversary of his death. Blackmun's papers begin with a diary he started at age 11; they occupy 600 feet of shelving in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress. The New Hampshire Bar Foundation provided support for the event.  Following her remarks, New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse fielded questions from a capacity crowd of more than 200 people in the NH Supreme Court chamber. Chief Justice John T. Broderick, Jr introduced her.
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