ABSTRACT
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger was charged by President Nixon with the task of reversing the liberal policies of the earlier Warren Court and to varying degrees the Burger Court has achieved this goal. Changing Supreme Court policies by changing Supreme Court personnel is a time-honored tradition in American politics. Many presidents have recognized that judging is, at least in part, a human process and as such may be influenced by individual attitudes and opinions. The Warren Court decisions for which data on later Supreme Court reactions were gathered include all non-per curiam decisions from 1961, 1962 and 1963 terms of the Court. Measuring Supreme Court treatments of its earlier decisions is difficult. Justices who wrote majority opinions in important cases under Warren, were being assigned few such cases under Burger and the reverse was true for other justices on the Court.
