Earl Warren

Serious and violent crime dropped in the first half of last year, continuing a pattern that began five years ago, according to statistics to be released today by the FBI. The five-year decline is the longest in 25 years.The preliminary figures, based on information reported to the FBI by local police departments, showed that the national crime rate decreased 3 percent in the first six months of 1996, led by a 7 percent drop in murders.The news was greeted with applause by experts, many of whom have been reluctant until now to believe that the drop in crime figures was more than a short-term statistical aberration.

With apologies to the Gospel according to Matthew, we would alter the biblical injunction to say that in Clarence Thomas' case, he will be judged in history by the votes he casts and the opinions he writes in his new position as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.All that has gone before -- from his stirring rise from being born black and poor in segregated Georgia to the ugly confirmation process that cast doubt on his conduct and veracity -- will be overshadowed by what is to come.

MAYBE YOU don't have the right to remain silent. Or to have an attorney present during police questioning. And maybe police can aggressively press you to talk even if you're gravely wounded or on your death bed. Of course, in nondemocratic nations, that's standard operating procedure. Police are in charge -- and citizens are at their mercy. But for the second time in three years, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering a challenge to its landmark Miranda decision, which protects people in this country from unbridled coercive interrogation by the police.

"The 'Brown' decision and the resulting civil rights movement in the United States inspired and galvanized human rights struggles around the world. ... For my family, commemorating this anniversary is an opportunity to convey that at the heart of positive race relations is a sense of unity, respect and acceptance." Cheryl Brown Henderson, daughter of the Rev. Oliver Brown, plaintiff, Brown vs. Board of Education "For me, like so many other children who were set to enter school for the first time in 1954, the Supreme Court decision in `Brown vs. Board' meant the realization of the nation's unkept promise of equal opportunity under the law for all people.

I RECENTLY wrote here that an oft-repeated Dwight Eisenhower quote about Justice William Brennan was not believable.In answer to the question, "Did you make any mistakes while president?", Ike is said to have answered, "Yes, two, and they are both sitting on the Supreme Court." Meaning Earl Warren and Brennan.I said I didn't believe it because archivists at the Eisenhower Library had never been able to verify it. Snuffy Berkov of Ocean Pines sent me a clipping from the New Yorker of last March 12 -- a profile of Justice Brennan by Nat Hentoff.

The Supreme Court decision in Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson that proclaims public school systems cannot seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student's race is largely irrelevant to Baltimore, which has one of the most segregated school systems in America. Baltimore, like most other urban systems in the United States, is just the extreme of the larger trend of school segregation in America. The National Center for Education Statistics reported in 2001 that the average white student attends a school that is 80 percent white, while 70 percent of black students attend schools where nearly two-thirds of students are black and Hispanic.

UNDERLYING the sadness in the tributes to Thurgood Marshall yesterday was this sense of regret: Oh, if only he had waited a little longer to retire.Justice Marshall was the last liberal Democrat on this court. The only liberals on the court now are Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, both Republicans, and the only Democrat is Byron White, a conservative.Justice Marshall retired in June, 1991, at the end of the 1990-1991 term. Rumor had it that he wanted to retire earlier, but he held on because he didn't want a Republican president to replace him with a conservative.

The Senate is expected to confirm this week — possibly as early as today — Elena Kagan to be a Supreme Court justice. I hope that's wrong. I am opposed to her nomination because she graduated from an Ivy League law school. What's wrong with that, you ask? The answer: All nine members would be "Ivies" if she gets on the bench. A second wrong would be that now, all members of the court would have never been elected to a government position. Contrast those circumstances to facts about the Supreme Court's justices of the last half of the 1950s.

FORTY YEARS ago last Tuesday the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that race-segregated education was unconstitutional.The anniversary was widely celebrated and the decision generously praised. Not by me. I respect Brown, but I'm saving my party hat and noise-maker for a much, much more important civil rights anniversary party three weeks from now.Here's why I say that:In 1954 the South said to the Supreme Court, "Never!" It said, "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!

WOULD THAT mine enemy would write a book, the old saying goes. Even better, would that she would write a law review article. If that won't do you in, nothing will.Bill Clinton and I spent last Thursday afternoon reading some of the legal scholarship of Lani Guinier. I read "Keeping the Faith: Black Voters in the Post-Reagan Era" in the Harvard Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Law Review (Spring 1989). I read "No Two Seats: The Elusive Quest for Political Equality" in the Virginia Law Review (November, 1991)