"The bitter feud between President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chief Justice Earl Warren framed the tumultuous future of the modern civil rights movement. Eisenhower was a gradualist who wanted to coax white Americans in the South into eventually accepting integration, while Warren, author of the Supreme Court's historic unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, demanded immediate action to dismantle the segregation of the public school system....

The clashes between President Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney over slavery, secession, and Lincoln's constitutional war powers went to the heart of Lincoln's presidency.Lincoln and Taney's bitter disagreements began with Taney's Dred Scott opinion in 1857, when the Chief Justice declared that the Constitution did not grant the black man any rights that the white man was bound to honor. Lincoln attacked the opinion as a warped judicial...