ABSTRACT
By 1972 President Nixon had placed Justices Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist on the high court. Since then, Republican presidents have successfully nominated eight more individuals for a total of eleven justices, and all were nominated for the announced purpose of reducing the amount of legislating from the bench. The reality begins with the fact that neither the Burger Court nor the Rehnquist Court reversed even one of the Warren Court's revolutionary decisions establishing new individual rights. One possible explanation for this surprising state of affairs is what might be called the Nixon Explanation. This hard-nosed, even cynical, view is that all those presidential calls for judicial restraint and all the reassuring testimony at the confirmation hearings should not be taken at face value. Overruling precedent, after all, can and has led to some progressive and popular outcomes, such as the desegregation of public schools.
