Harry Gwala, an African National Congress stalwart of the Mandela generation, lived the last years of his long life untroubled by the stigma of being labelled "the world's last Stalinist". A man dogged in his attachment to ideas whose time had passed, he was also a devoted Arsenal supporter - a remarkable thing in a Zulu. A British diplomat in the Thatcher era who visited him at his office in Pietermaritzburg hit upon a stratagem to defuse what he anticipated would be a tricky reception. Under his successor, William Rehnquist, the court finally made the tilt to the right which Burger had been expected to make.

Burger, for his part, will be remembered as the consolidator of the activism of the Warren court, and of its shift in the emphasis of American law from property rights to personal rights.. Behind this imposing exterior there was concealed a shrewd judicial brain. Shortly before his retirement in 1986, Burger said he thought that the decision in Roe ought to be reconsidered.On the bench, in his votes, Chief Justice Burger looked the very model of a Supreme Court Justice from Hollywood's central casting, with sculptured features and flowing silver hair. He resoundingly ordered Nixon to comply by handing over the tapes, and in the process not only hastened the first forced departure of a President from the White House, but also significantly broadened the Supreme Court's powers of judicial review.Even more troubling to conservatives was the Burger court's decision in the landmark abortion case of Roe v Wade. In it, and in a subsequent decision in Bolton v Doe, the court outraged conservative and especially fundamentalist religious "pro-life" activists by declaring that a woman has a fundamental right to have an abortion performed. Burger was unmoved either by political sympathy or personal obligation.

Warren Burger had been appointed by Nixon, and his decision in the Pentagon Papers case, in which he found himself in a minority of three on the court in opposing publication of a secret official study of the Vietnam war, led many to suppose that he would be a reliably conservative Chief Justice.Now Nixon was at bay, desperately trying to avoid being forced to hand over to the Special Watergate prosecutor the tape-recordings of his own Oval Office recording system which contained the "smoking gun"; evidence that Nixon had conspired to pervert the course of justice in relationship to the Watergate burglary. (It is within the prerogative of a Chief Justice to allocate the writing of opinions among the members of the court.) This was the appeal in United States v Nixon, a decision which led directly to the forced resignation, for the first time in history, of a President of the United States. This, the Burger court held, was a breach of the constitutional separation of powers between the presidency and the Congress.Far more dramatic was the court's decision in a case that Chief Justice Burger deliberately took for himself. And the laws struck down were at least as important.As one of the more conservative members of his own court, Justice Potter Stewart, put it, the Burger court tended - like its predecessor - to "make policy judgments" that were more "legislative" than "judicial".One of the Burger court's more significant decisions was in the Chadha case, in which it held unconstitutional the very widespread practice of the "legislative veto", a term for the procedure by which Congress had exerted its authority, in more than 200 statutes, to control the actions of the executive bureaucracy. And Schwartz quoted another expert, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, as saying, "We are all activist now." Under Warren, the court struck down 21 federal and 150 state statutes; under Burger, it invalidated 312 federal and no fewer than 288 state laws. Schwartz has written, the court under Burger "continued to be activist, rejecting more often than not the Holmes doctrine of judicial restraint".