Journal of Supreme Court History最新文献

As visitors filed into the Indianapolis Speedway on Memorial Day in 1965, they were greeted by a massive billboard declaring, “Save Our Republic! Impeach Earl Warren.”¹ Earlier that year, just outside the city of Selma, Alabama, observers and participants in the historic civil rights march that took place there were confronted by a similar billboard calling for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of the United States. Both billboards displayed the name of the group responsible for their conspicuous placement: the John Birch Society.² By 1966, there were hundreds of similar signs placed on streets, roads, and highways all across the nation. While not every billboard, sign, or pamphlet bore the name of the group, it was clear that the campaign to impeach Earl Warren was a project driven by the John Birch Society.³

Despite being one of the most prominent, well-funded campaigns ever to advocate for the impeachment of a Supreme Court justice, there has been little scholarship—legal or otherwise—examining the Impeach Earl Warren movement. Although Warren was never impeached, it is a mistake to treat the movement as nothing more than an interesting yet inconsequential chapter in the history of public criticisms of the Supreme Court. As this article argues, lots of people, including members of Congress and news reporters, misunderstood critical aspects of the Impeach Earl Warren movement, which led many to dismiss it.⁴ However, a clearer understanding of the movement helps better evaluate both its impact and its historical significance. This article examines three lesser known aspects of the Impeach Earl Warren movement. First, although the John Birch Society can most readily be identified with anti-Communism, the group's campaign to impeach Chief Justice Warren originates in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Second, the John Birch Society's leadership and tactics significantly impeded widespread acceptance of the Impeach Earl Warren movement into the mainstream conservative movement, despite a shared opposition to Brown, and may even have been counterproductive. Finally, what the John Birch Society sought to accomplish with its campaign to impeach Warren was more complicated and nuanced than simply removing the Chief Justice from the Court.

That the Impeach Earl Warren movement began as and was driven by an opposition to desegregation in the wake of Brown makes it all the more surprising that the movement failed to gain traction among the mainstream conservative movement. Although there are a few instances of members of Congress defending the John Birch Society,⁵⁵ there is virtually no evidence that members of Congress seriously supported the Impeach Earl Warren movement. Articles of impeachment were never brought, nor is there any indication in the Congressional Record that impeaching Chief Justice Warren was a serious option on

For decades, scholars have studied Lemon v. Kurtzman¹ for its First Amendment impact—failing to probe Lemon’s impact on racial segregation. Lemon, a 1971 landmark Establishment Clause case, involved civil rights advocates trying to use the First Amendment Establishment Clause and Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause to limit government support for segregated religious schools in Pennsylvania.² Lemon’s petitioners recognized that segregated religious private schools—and government aid to such schools—proliferated at the same time public schools faced post-Brown v. Board of Education desegregation requirements.³ Parochial school aid thus prevented successful public school integration.⁴ The Lemon petitioners sought to strike down Pennsylvania's Nonpublic Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which allowed the Superintendent of Public Schools to reimburse private (predominantly Catholic) schools for the salaries of educators teaching with public school instructional materials.⁵ This article considers the history surrounding Lemon’s colorblind approach to private school segregation in religious private schools—a subject not yet given due attention in scholarly literature.⁶

In a suit conceived as a national test case, petitioners assigned Alton T. Lemon, a Black civil rights activist and social worker, as the named plaintiff, rather than one of the white taxpayer or organizational plaintiffs—underscoring that the case was about racial discrimination in private religious schools, in addition to a constitutional right not to support others’ religious beliefs.⁷ As a father with Black children in Philadelphia public schools, Lemon believed white parochial private schools created a segregated school system negatively affecting his own children's education.⁸ Data in the appellants’ brief to the Supreme Court supported this allegation.⁹ Thus, the Lemon petitioners brought a Fourteenth Amendment segregation claim, in addition to their better-known Establishment Clause claim.¹⁰ Yet, no ustice ruled on the former.¹¹ The Court dismissed the segregation claim for lack of standing,¹² ignoring evidence that Pennsylvania's government-funded parochial schools harmed Black children like Mr. Lemon's by creating white-only and Black-only student bodies. However, every justice noted the issue of segregation in Lemon, and school desegregation was a major topic in courts across the nation,¹³ making it unlikely that no member of the Court was influenced by the issue.¹⁴

Although the segregation claim was dismissed, the Lemon Court put forward a new Establishment Clause test, which acted functionally as a weapon to wield against Pennsylvania private school segregation. Under this test, for a law to be constitutional, it must