In remarks at a conference in Texas on Friday, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh said rulings from the tumultuous period between the 1950s and ’60s, though unpopular at the time, eventually came to be accepted as “the fabric of American constitutional law.”
Kavanaugh was referring to the court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, which issued landmark rulings that expanded civil rights in the U.S. and is widely seen as having shaped key aspects of modern American society. According to The Associated Press, Kavanaugh pointed to rulings like Brown v. Board of Education and others on free speech and criminal rights to argue that the Warren Court was “unpopular basically from start to finish from ’53 to ’69.”
“What the court kept doing is playing itself, sticking to its principles,” he said. “And you know, look, a lot of those decisions [were] unpopular, and a lot of them are landmarks now that we accept as parts of the fabric of America and the fabric of American constitutional law.”
His comment about unpopular rulings may have been an allusion to the court’s deeply