People will be lauding William Rehnquist and his tenure as Associate Justice then Chief Justice on the Supreme Court. Not many will want to hear the truth about how he behaved, what he believed, and how some of his decisions have harmed American society. Someone has to tell the truth, though.

Alan Dershowitz writes:

Rehnquist bragged about being first in his class at Stanford Law School. Today Stanford is a great law school with a diverse student body, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it discriminated against Jews and other minorities, both in the admission of students and in the selection of faculty. ... Rehnquist not only benefited in his class ranking from this discrimination; he was also part of that bigotry. When he was nominated to be an associate justice in 1971, I learned from several sources who had known him as a student that he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school’s few Jewish students. He also was infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes.

As a law clerk, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum for Justice Jackson while the court was considering several school desegregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist’s memo, entitled “A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases,” defended the separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy “was right and should be reaffirmed.” When questioned about the memos by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986, Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice, stating – under oath – that his memo was meant to reflect the views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation. According to historian Mark Tushnet, Justice Jackson’s longtime legal secretary called Rehnquist’s Senate testimony an attempt to “smear[] the reputation of a great justice.” Rehnquist later admitted to defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks. He did not acknowledge that he committed perjury in front of the Judiciary Committee to get his job.

This isn’t even everything - it actually gets a bit worse after this and you should read the whole thing to understand why. If you think that Rehnquist’s anti-Semitism is an aberration, consider these comments that Dershowitz received after he publicly criticized Rehnquist:

One writer called me “a jew prick that takes it in the a** from ruth ginzburg [sic].” Another said I am “an ignorant socialist left-wing political hack …. You’re like a little Heinrich Himmler! (even the resemblance is uncanny!).” Yet another informed me that I “personally make us all lament the defeat of the Nazis!”

All of this suggests that anti-Semitism and racism are not really dead and buried among American conservatives. It would be wrong to suggest that all conservatives harbor such vile views and it’s hardly plausible that it’s true of even most of them, but it doesn’t appear to be as unusual as it should be by this point in time and history.

People will praise Rehnquist, but there aren’t any particular decisions which he wrote which stand out as decisive, incisive, or brilliant. People will praise Rehnquist, but only for dissenting from decisions which stand as hallmarks of modern American liberty (like Roe v. Wade) or for authoring decisions which brought shame on the Court (like Bush v. Gore). People who claim to abhor judicial activism will praise him for the “correct” results of his decisions, not for anything about his judicial philosophy.

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