Personalities and partisanship: how the Rehnquist Court reached its civil rights decisions

This work focuses on four major areas where the Rehnquist Court affected civil rights: the death penalty, race-based affirmative action, gender-based affirmative action, and minorities voting rights. Each of these areas will feature one key case McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson (1989), Johnson v. Transportation Agency (1987), and Shaw v. Reno (1993) and the impact that American politics and the justices relationships, personalities, and political leanings had on these opinions. These four paradigm cases demonstrate that in the Rehnquist Courts civil rights rulings, the justices narrowly interpreted the Equal Protection Clause and Title VII to issue conservative rulings in racial discrimination cases; yet largely because of Sandra Day OConnors different responses to discrimination that women and minorities faced, the Court issued more moderate rulings in gender discrimination cases. In all of these decisions, partisanship played a larger role than the justices schools of jurisprudence.