high school student who had been suspended for wearing black armbands to school to protest the Vietnam War. Extending First Amendment rights to school students for the first time, Fortas wrote that neither "students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate". Epperson v. Arkansas In 1968, Fortas persuaded the court to accept the appeal of Little Rock Central High School teacher Sue Epperson who had challenged Arkansas' anti-evolution law with the support of the state teachers union. Epperson had won the case, but the Arkansas Supreme Court had overturned the ruling. Although the Court agreed quickly after hearing the case that the Arkansas ruling should be reversed, there was no consensus as to why, most Justices favoring fairly narrow grounds. Fortas was the architect and the author of the broader landmark majority opinion in Epperson v. Arkansas that emerged, banning religiously based creation narratives from public school science curricula. Presidential power Fortas believed in an expanded executive branch and a less powerful legislative branch. He wrote: "The enormous growth of presidential power from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson was a necessary and an inevitable adaptation of our constitutional system to national needs." Nomination to be Chief Justice On June 26, 1968, Johnson nominated Fortas as Chief Justice of the United States, to succeed Earl Warren, who had submitted his resignation effective with the confirmation of a successor. Anticipating that conservative members of the Senate would have concerns about Fortas's liberal opinions, Johnson simultaneously announced that he would fill the vacancy created by Fortas's elevation with United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Homer Thornberry of Texas. The propriety of the coordinated resignation-nomination on the eve of the November presidential election was called into question by Republican candidate Richard Nixon and the media. By the time the Judiciary Committee opened hearings on the nomination on July 11, bi-partisan opposition to the nomination (among Republicans and Southern Democrats) had become well organized. Fortas was the first sitting associate justice, nominated for chief justice, ever to appear before the Senate. He underwent four days of questioning about his legal career, judicial philosophy, and his relationship with President Johnson. Judiciary Committee chairman James Eastland told Johnson he "had never seen so much feeling against a man as against Fortas". Antisemitism likely played a role in the confirmation battle. Afterward, Eastland reportedly