William H. Rehnquist

Anti-terrorism laws will be challenged

Laws written in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. are certain to generate lawsuits, Chief Justice of the United States William H. Rehnquist, told a jam-packed crowd at the Law School’s Caplin Auditorium Oct. 27.

“Criminal defendants naturally want to suppress evidence which incriminates them, and if previously unused methods of gathering the evidence are used, these defendants will doubtless challenge them,” Rehnquist said in his keynote address to a two-day conference on the future of American law and legal education that celebrated the 175th anniversary of the Law School.

One obvious feature of the future will be ongoing growth in the federal appeals courts’ caseload, the chief justice predicted. In 1900 there were 67 district court judges and 28 judgeships in the courts of appeals. Today, to cope with the greater burden of cases, there are 651 and 179, respectively.

Creating special courts, such as the Tax Court or the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, is more promising, he said, but where such courts have been created in Europe they have lead to a “specialized bar arguing to specialized judges, which can create some pretty arcane doctrine.”

Noting that Rehnquist has chosen more clerks from U.Va. than any other law school, Law Dean John C. Jeffries Jr. informally inducted the chief justice in the “Virginia School of Law family.” Rehnquist’s daughter Janet, inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, is a 1985 law school graduate.