Justice for All by Jim Newton Page B

life, happily consumed by her family, by then a full complement of her own children and their children—sixteen grandchildren in all. Although not a public person, Nina did occasionally visit the Court, where the staff and justices welcomed her with familial kindness. She was there, for instance, in hat and gloves, when the Court heard arguments in the Bakke case, which challenged affirmative action laws and grew out of California. As her husband always had, she refused to comment on what she’d heard. Through the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s, Nina resided modestly in the apartment she and Earl had shared, surrounded by memories and memorabilia of their life. “It’s all right to be sad,” she confided to the Sacramento Bee in a rare 1977 interview. “But one must not be dismal.” Today, Nina Warren is buried with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery. They lie together on a sunny hilltop, surrounded by the dignified white crosses and stars that blanket Arlington’s slopes. Their bodies rest beneath a tombstone inscribed with a passage from Warren’s book, A Republic, If You Can Keep It :
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    Where there is injustice, we should correct it; where there is poverty, we should eliminate it; where there is corruption, we should stamp it out; where there is violence we should punish it; where there is neglect, we should provide care; where there is war, we should restore peace; and wherever corrections are achieved we should add them permanently to our storehouse of treasures.
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    The Warren children and grandchildren, meanwhile, scattered across the American landscape, most but not all settling in California, growing up and growing older in the state that had fashioned Warren and that he, in turn, remade for them. Today the Warrens prosper in all walks of life. They work in real estate and the law, in education and politics. They are the living memory of Earl and Nina, blond and buoyant, exuberant and successful. They uphold their family’s legacy with grace.
    But while Warren survives through his family, his place in the politics of the nation is more complex. The decisions he authored and orchestrated at the Supreme Court continue to set the parameters of modern American life, and most have become more settled over time. The decisions that launched the movement to impeach Earl Warren—the desegregation of schools, the insistence on free and fair elections at all levels of government, the curbs on prosecutions of Communists, the end to government-sponsored prayer in public schools—are such settled facts of American society that they barely stir dispute. No serious person today suggests that the poor be denied lawyers in state trials, as they were before Gideon . Few argue that illegally seized evidence should be admissible in trials, as it was before Mapp . Even Miranda, the source of fury in its time, has embedded itself so firmly in the law that police have learned to live with it and conservatives are loath to disturb it. The great exception, of course, is Griswold, an opinion that continues to roil the American landscape by providing the philosophical underpinnings for a right of privacy and thus for constitutionally protected abortion. Still, given the range and depth of the decisions of the Warren Court, one cannot help but be struck at the endurance of its work.
    Warren, by contrast, has defied easy appreciation, as perceptions of him vary widely, according to the vantage point from which he is seen. In Sacramento, Warren’s images are dusted off periodically by politicians eager to associate themselves with his moderation. When Arnold Schwarzenegger signed compacts with California’s Indians in 2004, he pulled Warren’s old desk out of storage for the event, and when voters rebuked Schwarzenegger in the state’s 2005 special elections, he returned with a State of the State address in which he cited Warren, along with Pat Brown, Ronald