WARREN, EARL

born March 19, 1891, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S. died July 9, 1974, Washington, D.C. American jurist, the 14th chief justice of the United States (1953-69), who presided over the Supreme Court during a period of sweeping changes in U.S. constitutional law, especially in the areas of race relations, criminal procedure, and legislative apportionment. The son of a railroad worker, Warren was educated in law at the University of California, Berkeley. In public office uninterruptedly for 50 years, he served as district attorney for Alameda County, Calif. (1925-39), attorney general of California (1939-43), and governor of the state for three terms (1943-53). His only defeat at the polls came in 1948, when he was the Republican candidate for vice president of the United States. Nominated as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, Warren served in that capacity until his retirement in 1969. In his first term on the bench, he spoke for a unanimous court in the leading school-desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), declaring unconstitutional the separation of public-school children according to race. Rejecting the "separate but equal" doctrine that had prevailed since 1896, Warren stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178 (1957), Warren upheld the right of a witness to refuse to testify before a congressional committee, and, in other opinions concerning federal and state loyalty and security investigations, he likewise took a position discounting the fear of communist subversion that was prevalent in the United States during the 1950s. In Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), known as the "one man, one vote" decision, he held that representation in state legislatures must be apportioned equally on the basis of population rather than geographical areas, remarking that "legislators represent people, not acres or trees." In Miranda v. State of Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966)-a landmark decision of the Warren court's rulings on criminal justice-he ruled that the police, before questioning a criminal suspect, must inform him of his rights to remain silent and to have counsel present (appointed for him if he is indigent) and that a confession obtained in defiance of these requirements is inadmissible in court. On Nov. 29, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Warren chairman of a commission established to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (November 22) and the murder of the presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The report of the Warren Commission (q.v.) was submitted in September 1964 and was published later that year. Additional reading Henry M. Christman (ed.), The Public Papers of Chief Justice Earl Warren (1959); Luther A. Huston, Pathway to Judgment (1966); Leo Katcher, Earl Warren (1967); John Downing Weaver, Warren: The Man, the Court, the Era (1968).