The Warren Court: 5 Out of 5 Stars [TEASER]

Homer, do you want your son to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court or a sleazy male stripper?

Can't he be both like the late Earl Warren?

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects.

On this week's Patreon-only episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are talking about the Warren Court.

Chief Justice Earl Warren used his tenure to aggressively expand privacy protections, civil rights, and the rights of criminal defendants.

It's a legacy that demonstrates the possibility of courts forging a more just world when the political process proves unable to do so.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court, but not the Warren Court, sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have haunted our nation like your mother-in-law haunts the holiday season.

I am Peter.

I'm here with Rhiannon.

Hi.

Hello.

And Michael.

Hey, everybody.

I like my mother-in-law.

Isn't that the.

Well, I'm sorry, but it's our holiday episode by default.

And I'm going to do some old-fashioned holiday sexism.

Isn't that the thing in

that skit, right?

Oh, my God, he admit it.

Paul, I bet you like your mother-in-law, right?

That's right.

I, no, I had a, this is a conscious decision.

I was like, I could say in-laws, but I was like, it's not as good.

No, you know, yeah,

punchier.

People want to hear women get put down.

That's what the crowd loves, and I'm here to please them.

That's what the people come to 5-4 for.

That's our thing.

They all say it.

You want to hear that other shit go over to strict scrutiny.

All right.

Today's episode, in the spirit of the holiday season, is about the Warren Court.

We wanted to inject some positivity into the discourse by talking about the very brief period of time when the Supreme Court was actually good.

So we're going to walk through some of the best and most significant cases that that court handed down and talk a bit about the philosophy that drove Earl Warren.

And before we get into it, I think maybe just a tiny bit of historical context for our listeners who don't know much about the Warren Court.

Earl Warren was nominated Chief Justice in 1953 by Dwight Eisenhower.

Eisenhower would reportedly come to believe that the Warren appointment was the greatest mistake of his tenure.

Which is how you know it was good.

Get fucked.

Yeah.

Eat shit, loser.

So we've talked a lot on the podcast about the Warren Court, and that is because the modern conservative legal movement is in large part a reaction to the Warren Court.

Everything they did in the 50s and 60s shaped how conservatives view the law and the sort of apparatus that they built to fight back, to reconstruct the law and reconstruct public conceptions of the Constitution in a way that benefited conservatives.

I think that's right, Peter.

And I also think that public conceptions and what we're taught about the Supreme Court is so much about cases that came out of the Warren Court era, right?

We think of the Supreme Court as an institution, the way it operated under Earl Warren.

Yeah.

So, you know, we're going to talk about cases that the Warren Court handed down, but it might be worth just a little tiny bit of color about Earl Warren himself.

He was nominated Chief Justice in 1953.

Before that, he had been a Republican Attorney General and Governor in California for many years, and not a liberal Republican, certainly not by modern standards.

In fact, he oversaw the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, was an active proponent of those camps.

Absolutely.

Supported it, yes.

So his tenure on the Supreme Court, where he's famously liberal and civil rights-oriented, is sort of a redemption arc in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

So let's talk about the best cases.

And there's only one place to start.

1954.

Brown v.

Board of Education.

That's right.

Hey, folks, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, you're going to have to subscribe.

This episode is one of our premium Patreon-only episodes.

Membership starts at just five bucks a month.

So if you want to hear the rest, join us at patreon.com slash five fourpod.

That's five four pod all spelled out.

Members get a bunch of stuff.

Not only do you get access to the premium episodes, but access to subscriber-only events, discounts on merch, and at the $10 a month level, you get bigger discounts on merch and membership in the incredibly rowdy 5-4 Slack.

So again, that's patreon.com/slash 5-4pod, 5-4 pod all spelled out.

Become a member today.