Supreme changes

Top stories of 2005 | The High Court | Lynn Vincent

Until 2005, the cast of U.S. Supreme Court justices had remained unchanged for more than a decade. Then in July, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement, setting the stage for a high-court drama featuring a conservative hero, a rising star, a cameo performer, and—many liberals now argue—a villain.

To succeed Ms. O'Connor, President Bush on July 19 nominated John Roberts, 50, a Washington, D.C., legal star with a nearly unparalleled record of success as a Supreme Court advocate. But on Sept. 3, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, died after battling thyroid cancer, and the president recast Mr. Roberts as his nominee for chief justice.

For 33 years, Mr. Rehnquist had anchored the court's conservative wing. With patience, wry humor, and an encyclopedic knowledge of constitutional history and law, he gradually reoriented the court's approach to questions of church and state. Mr. Rehnquist was often the lone dissenter early in his high-court career. In 1973, joined only by Justice Byron White, he dissented in Roe v. Wade, writing that the majority, in affirming legal abortion, "has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment," since at least 36 state and territorial laws already limited abortion by the time the amendment was ratified.