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lunch. This was viewed as a priceless benefit of being a clerk at the Court. The easygoing, unassuming justice from Arizona—a close friend of the Court's most liberal member, William O. Douglas, a holdover from the Warren Court years—filled his dance card quickly. No fancy restaurants. Cheeseburger and a beer was a favorite combo, befitting his roots in Milwaukee. He was interesting, direct, and friendly, but never overly chummy or ingratiating. He was not a slap-you-on-the-back type, nor was he gregarious, like the elfish, much-beloved Justice Brennan, an Eisenhower appointee and faithful lieutenant to Chief Justice Warren, who became the longtime leader of the post-Warren Court's liberal wing. The cerebral Rehnquist would saunter around—taking walks with his clerks, unnoticed by tourists—perhaps with an Anthony Trollope novel under his arm.
    The casual, no-airs friendliness of this native Wisconsinite transplanted to Arizona did not in the slightest dilute his uncompromisingly conservative judicial philosophy. Rehnquist was greatly admired by then Chief Justice Burger, who for his part was more deeply conservative than his voting behavior indicated. The two were so philosophically in agreement that it was natural for writing assignments to flow easily from Burger in Justice Rehnquist's direction. And Rehnquist was gutsy. He didn't seem to mind if he was in solitary dissent. He became known as the “Lone Ranger.” He was willing to stand up—all by himself—against the crowd of justices moving in a different direction.
    As President Nixon's youngest appointee (at age forty-seven), Rehnquist was seen as situated at the vanguard of change, of movement away from the recently concluded Warren Court years. As a junior justice, he attacked Warren Court precedents with relish, sought to narrow them at every turn, and dissented deeply—as he did in
Roe v. Wade
—when the Burger Court itself engaged in activism. He was decidedly not a centrist, even though the Court under Chief Justice Burger was moving in that direction. The trend lines were especially strong due to the powerful centrist influence of Justice Lewis Powell, Jr. The order of the day was a quiet departure or backing off from Warren Court precedents, but only in the sense of not pursuing their logic further. This was, as one student of the Burger Court put it, the “counterrevolution that wasn't.”
    This genteel moderation did not appear to sit well with the Court's youngest, and newest, member. He wanted to move more aggressively, to clean out the precedents littering the pathways of constitutional law.
    Justice Rehnquist made his views known outside the courthouse, where he openly criticized liberal theories of constitutional law. For example, in a 1976
Texas Law Review
article, he lampooned the idea of the “living Constitution,” calling it an invitation to judicial lawmaking. Judges, in Rehnquist's view, should not interfere with the representative process. They should allow democratic self-rule. Rehnquist's understanding of the judicial power echoed, ironically, President Franklin Roosevelt's criticism of the “Nine Old Men” who had struck down important measures passed, at FDR's urging, by the New Deal Congress.
    In 1986, when Reagan decided to appoint Rehnquist chief justice, he also settled on Antonin Scalia as Rehnquist's successor. Scalia had distinguished himself as a powerful intellectual voice on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington and through his decisions had endeared himself to legal conservatives. The expectation was, at least inside the Reagan administration, that Rehnquist, with the considerable help of Scalia, would move the Court significantly to the right.
    It was not to be. Soon, the Rehnquist judicial tone changed. While he continued to articulate certain core beliefs, most importantly his consistent view that
Roe v. Wade
was wrongly decided and should be overruled, he was no longer speaking out, and seldom if ever in