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Social Science And Segregation Before Brown, Herbert Hovenkamp

Duke Law Journal

A wide variety of scholarship has addressed the law of race relations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of that scholarship has presented the judicial record in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era cases as reactionary and somehow in violation of the basic principles of equality implicit in the American Constitution, particularly in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments. Professor Hovenkamp calls this view into question by examining the science and social science of that period and the use of scientific information in race relations cases. He concludes that late nineteenth and early twentieth century courts used …