"Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office. In the future I will be more circumspect," the Supreme Court Justice said in a statement Thursday.
Burger served as chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1969 until 1986. Linda Greenhouse, author of The Burger Court, says those years helped establish the court's conservative legal foundation.
Where does the decision fit in the court's long history of actions on abortion rights and restrictions? And what effect might the case involving a Texas law have on other states?
This comes after Monday's landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion. Since then, new restrictions on the procedure have also been rejected in Alabama, Mississippi and Wisconsin.
While Texas' law governing clinics that perform abortions was among the most restrictive, many other states have laws with some of the same provisions.
The justices ruled 5-3 that a Texas law setting requirements for clinics that provide abortions — a law that was expected to cause many clinics to close — was unconstitutional.
In a 6-2 vote, the justices concluded that misdemeanor assault convictions for domestic violence are sufficient to invoke a federal ban on firearms possession.
McDonnell was sentenced to two years in prison after he was convicted of public corruption. The high court, however, ruled the government used too-broad an interpretation of the federal bribery law.
The day after Solicitor General Donald Verrilli announced he was stepping down, he sat down with NPR's Nina Totenberg to reflect on his five years as the government's chief advocate.
The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to an affirmative action program at the University of Texas at Austin brought by a white woman who claimed she would have gotten in if she weren't white.