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Approaches To Brown V. Board Of Education: Some Notes On Teaching A Seminal Case, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

During the past year, dozens of American law schools commemorated the
fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.[1] The attention was
appropriate because Brown is one of the Supreme Court’s seminal decisions.
By all appearances, the fiftieth anniversary of Brown attracted much more
attention than did, say, the 200th anniversary of Marbury v. Madison [2] in 2003
or the centennial of Lochner v. New York [3] this year. Brown’s unique
significance resides in part in the fact that it changed America’s constitutional norm regarding race, our most embarrassing and vexing problem. In effectively overturning the doctrine of Plessy v. …