Digital Commons Network^™

For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This review essay analyzes Derrick Bell's provocative new book, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (2004). In Silent Covenants, Professor Bell reviews Brown v. Board of Education, and inquires "whether another approach than the one embraced by the Brown decision might have been more effective and less disruptive in the always-contentious racial arena." Specifically, Professor Bell joins black conservatives in critiquing what he describes as a misguided focus on achieving racial balance in schools and argues that the quality of education for minority children, in particular Blacks, would have been better today …

In Re Turner (1867), Charles Olmsted

Legal History Publications

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregation and separate but equal policies were unconstitutional. By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment and race-specific social science data in its opinion, the Court overlooked the Thirteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, including equal access to education. The Court’s decision “would rest on a much more sound footing if [it] had paid more attention to the history of the Thirteenth Amendment and its accompanying case law.”

By disregarding the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished slavery, the Court emphasized the racist attitudes of opponents of Civil War …

Under A Critical Race Theory Lens -- Brown V. Board Of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone And Its Troubled Legacy, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

This critical book review argues that James T. Patterson’s narrative in, "Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy," is a mostly balanced historical reflection. Here, the term balanced will refer to giving consideration to both the negative and positive aspects of the phenomenon in question. To advance its thesis, the book review initially offers an overview of Patterson’s historical narrative and evaluation of the Brown legacy. Then the book review analyzes Patterson’s conclusions through a Critical Race Theory lens. Given the focus of Critical Race Theory on race and the law, especially on how …

Two "Wrongs" Do/Can Make A Right: Remembering Mathematics, Physics, & Various Legal Analogies (Two Negatives Make A Positive; Are Remedies Wrong?) The Law Has Made Him Equal, But Man Has Not, John C. Duncan Jr

Journal Publications

This article demonstrates the incomplete logic and inconsistent legal reasoning used in the argument against affirmative action. The phrase "two wrongs don't make a right" is often heard in addressing various attempts to equalize, to balance, and to correct the acknowledged wrongs of slavery and segregation and their derivative effects. Yet, "two wrongs do/can make a right" has a positive connotation. This article reviews the history of societal and judicial wrongs against Blacks, as well as the evolution of the narrowing in legal reasoning concerning discrimination against minorities, including Blacks. Next, the legal reasoning behind legacy programs will be reviewed …

Embracing Segregation: The Jurisprudence Of Choice And Diversity In Race And Sex Separatism In Schools, Nancy Levit

Faculty Works

Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, segregation based on race and sex is sweeping the nation's educational systems. Courts are rapidly dismantling desegregation orders, and when those desegregation orders end, school districts racially resegregate. At precisely the same time this end to racial desegregation is occurring, the government is beginning to sponsor sex segregation in schools as well. The No Child Left Behind Act provides over $400 million in federal funds for experiments in education, such as single-sex schools and classes. Embracing Segregation draws connections between the end of racial desegregation and the beginning of government-sponsored sex segregation …

Brown V. Board Of Education, Footnote 11, And Multidisciplinarity, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Education And Interrogation: Comparing Brown And Miranda, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, Ross Feldmann

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Although the Warren Court had its share of grand decisions, perhaps it should be known instead for its grand goals--particularly the goals of ending America's shameful history of segregation and of providing a broad array of constitutional rights to persons accused of committing crimes. Brown v. Board of Education and Miranda v. Arizona, the two most well-known decisions of the Warren Court (and possibly the two most well-known decisions in the history of the Supreme Court), best capture the Court's labor in the rocky fields of our nation's legal, political, and cultural life. In this Article, we explore certain parallels …

Legal Scholarship Symposium: The Scholarship Of Lawrence M. Friedman, Robert J. Cottrol

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Lawrence M. Friedman has achieved a singular preeminence as a legal historian for articulating a new vision of legal history as a discipline in his 1973 work entitled A History of American Law. This book treats American law as a mirror of society. At the time, Friedman's vision was still something quite new in American legal historiography. James Willard Hurst's notions of legal history as a sociolegal inquiry would heavily influence Friedman, helping to move the field into new and often surprising precincts. Friedman's approach to legal history is one that introduced us to previously unexamined actors and institutions. Whether …

Separate, Unequal And Alien: Comments On The Limits Of Brown, Lenni B. Benson

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Multicultural Lawyering: Teaching Psychology To Develop Cultural Self-Awareness, Carwina Weng

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Much of the current literature in multicultural lawyering focuses on learning substantive information about clients who are culturally different from the lawyer, such as how the client's culture perceives eye contact or reacts to science-based world views. This article notes that such a focus sidesteps the human reality that every person reacts to people who are different from him- or herself unconsciously in ways that may be culturally insensitive and discriminatory and that this human reaction occurs despite awareness of the general values, attitudes, and beliefs of the client's culture. It therefore suggests that multicultural lawyering training should begin with …

True Integration: Advancing Brown's Goal Of Educational Equity In The Wake Of Grutter, Lia Epperson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, founder of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund ("LDF"), and head of the legal team that litigated Brown v. Board of Education,' knew well the challenges that desegregation posed in a nation founded on a system of racial subjugation and white supremacy. A full thirty years after Brown, he acknowledged: Desegregation is not and was never expected to be an easy task. Racial attitudes ingrained in our Nation's childhood and adolescence are not quickly thrown aside in its middle years.... In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow …

Legal Scholarship Symposium: The Scholarship Of Lawrence M. Friedman, Robert J. Cottrol

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Lawrence M. Friedman has achieved a singular preeminence as a legal historian for articulating a new vision of legal history as a discipline in his 1973 work entitled A History of American Law. This book treats American law as a mirror of society. At the time, Friedman's vision was still something quite new in American legal historiography. James Willard Hurst's notions of legal history as a sociolegal inquiry would heavily influence Friedman, helping to move the field into new and often surprising precincts. Friedman's approach to legal history is one that introduced us to previously unexamined actors and institutions.

Whether …