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Full-Text Articles in Law
From Freeman To Brown And Back Again: Principle, Pragmatism, And Proximate Cause In The School Desegregation Decisions, David Crump
Washington Law Review
A court deciding a constitutional case should announce a clear principle, one that the people can easily understand and follow. At the same time, such a decision should be pragmatic, in that it should effectively accomplish its goals while treating all affected persons fairly. The simultaneous fulfillment of these two criteria, however, can sometimes be extraordinarily difficult. In this article, Professor Crump considers how well the school desegregation remedies ordered by the Supreme Court fit the tests of principle and pragmatism. He concludes that the early decisions, as well as many of the later ones, do not achieve both goals, …
Statutory Misinterpretations: A Legal Autopsy, Eric Schnapper
Statutory Misinterpretations: A Legal Autopsy, Eric Schnapper
Articles
If the Supreme Court is willing to learn from past mistakes, the Court would find it particularly instructive to re-examine the now quite numerous civil rights decisions which have failed to survive congressional scrutiny. The United States Reports are today littered with the corpses of short-lived opinions purporting to interpret federal anti-discrimination statutes; most were dead on arrival in the bound volumes. October Term 1988 was a veritable Pickett's Charge of conservative misinterpretation. Patterson v. McLean Credit Union briefly displaced and destroyed much of section 1981; Public Employees Retirement System v. Betts temporarily overran parts of the Age Discrimination in …