The Political Thicket | Radiolab Presents: More Perfect Podcast | Season 1 Episode 2

On this episode, the case that pushed one Supreme Court justice to a nervous breakdown, brought a boiling feud to a head, and changed the course of the Supreme Court forever.

When Chief Justice Earl Warren was asked at the end of his career, “What was the most important case of your tenure?,” there were a lot of answers he could have given. After all, he had presided over some of the most important decisions in the court’s history — cases that dealt with segregation in schools, the right to an attorney, the right to remain silent, just to name a few. But his answer was a surprise: He said, “Baker v. Carr,” a 1962 redistricting case.

On this episode of More Perfect, we talk about why this case was so important — important enough, in fact, that it pushed one Supreme Court justice to a nervous breakdown, brought a boiling feud to a head, put one justice in the hospital, and changed the course of the Supreme Court — and the nation — forever.

More Perfect is a spin-off series from Radiolab about how the Supreme Court got so supreme.

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Illustration by Mitch Boyer of Charles Evans Whittaker, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1957-1962.
Video by Michael Snyder, Kim Nowacki and Andrea Latimer.