Reagan Administrations - Reagan and the Judiciary
Reagan and the Judiciary
Reagan, like most of his fellow conservatives, was annoyed by the Supreme Court's activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Ever since the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954, which desegregated public schools, the Court had made precedent-breaking decisions that angered conservatives, such as the elimination of prayer and Bible reading in schools, the creation of a Constitutional right to privacy, and the decision (Roe v. Wade, 1973) that abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy, was constitutionally protected under this privacy doctrine. Conservative jurists and legal scholars were critical of judicial activism. They favored judicial restraint, by which the justices confined themselves to deciding cases strictly according to the Constitution, the written law, and precedent.
Reagan, hoping to end this era of judicial activism, had three...
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