How the Burger Court shaped today's conversations on race and crime

St. Paul native Warren Burger served as Chief Justice of the United States from 1969 — when he was appointed by Richard Nixon — until 1986.

The 17 years he led the Supreme Court are often written off as a transitional period — a segue between a liberal court under Earl Warren to the more conservative courts that followed, under William Rehnquist and now John Roberts.

It's sometimes viewed as a time in which "nothing happened."

But a new book by Michael Graetz and Linda Greenhouse argues just the opposite.

The influence of the Burger court is widely underestimated, Greenhouse told MPR News host Tom Weber. That's the argument behind "The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right."

"Just to put it in context: We had the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and 60s — really a boundary-shattering court, a really liberal court. [It] created all kinds of rules and new rights, brought us a constitutional rule for school integration ... [It] said you couldn't have organized school prayer, gave all kinds of new procedural rights to criminal defendants and so on," Greenhouse said.

Those major decisions of the Warren Court were inherited by Burger's court, and "by 1986, all of those or just about all of those decisions were still on the books. So people have written off that period as a transitional period."

But that's not the right interpretation, Greenhouse said. Take your Miranda rights for example — rights that were established in Miranda vs. Arizona in 1966, under Chief Justice Earl Warren.

By 1986, Greenhouse said, "you still had your rights to the Miranda warning if you were questioned in custody by police, but in a series of decisions during the Burger years, those rights really got hollowed out with all kinds of exceptions."

In "The Burger Court," Greenhouse and Graetz trace some of these decisions and explore the real implications of Burger's 17-year-role as Chief Justice.

"We try to reconstruct a period when an awful lot happened that still shapes our legal and constitutional landscape today — but it's almost as if many people just didn't notice," Greenhouse said.

For the full interview with Linda Greenhouse on "The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right," use the audio player above.