THE SUPREME COURT: Direction Disputed

In November 1955, Earl Warren, longtime governor of California and new Chief Justice of the U.S., was remarkably candid in specifying his hopes for the direction of U.S. justice over the next quarter-century. Satisfied that "the more cynical forms of 'legal realism' are growing less fashionable," Warren declared for a credo of legal idealism. "It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive," he wrote in FORTUNE. "The beginning of justice is the capacity to generalize and make objective one's private sense of wrong." Earl Warren's Supreme...