am Rehnquist, was a figure who would have been regarded as at the rightward extreme of the judiciary two decades earlier. The Supreme Court nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991, the latter not finally resolved as this is being written, illustrated both the rightward movement of the Court, which liberals sought to retard by blocking the confirmations of conservative nominees, and the intensely political atmosphere that now surrounds the Court itself.
The balance of this study will address the politics of the Miranda decision. We are not concerned here, save indirectly, with the correctness of Miranda as either law or public policy. Instead, our concern is with how Miranda shaped the politics of the Court, giving impetus to the movement to make the Court at once more conservative and more overtly political, and with the future prospects of a Supreme Court that has, since the Warren era, been thrust into a state of permanent low-level crisis (Lasser, 1988, p. 243). The Supreme Court has, through most of its history, been a rather conservative force in American public affairs. Its most famous -- or notorious -- decisions were (save for those like Marbury v. Madison, which dealt with the structure of government) conservative ones. Dred Scott reaffirmed the legality of slavery. Plessy V. Ferguson legitimized school segregation under the doctrine of "separate but equal." From the late nineteenth century through the early years of the New Deal, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the sanctity of property rights over assertions of workers' rights, overturning various liberal measures such as child-labor laws, a progressive income tax, work-hours limitations, and New Deal legislation. Political attacks on the Court thus generally came from the political left.
During the twenty-year Democratic dominance under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, the conservative coloration of the Court was wea...