When Earl Warren became chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1953, only one of the nine justices had served as a judge before joining the court. After the landmark court ruling the next year that ended segregation, court detractors masked their resentment of Brown v. Board of Education with a patina of legitimacy: They painted Warren, a former prosecutor and three-term governor from California, as the embodiment of an untrained politician masked in judicial robes.
Experienced judges adhering to well-established precedents, they asserted, would have never overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine. Pointing to this lack of judicial experience as the reason for the justices’ flawed decision-making, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland complained to Sen. Joe McCarthy: “We have politicians instead of lawyers on the court.”
The insistence by rivals of the Warren court on appointing justices with judicial experience eventually became the norm. The record bears this out: All but one of the last 16 justices had been judges before their promotion to the high court.
