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Brown V. Board Of Education And The Origins Of The Activist Insecurity In Civil Rights Law, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

The peculiar thing about Brown v. Board of Education is that, when it was decided, liberal legal scholars trashed it. Indeed, the modern conservative movement has built its attack on civil rights initiatives and its critique of the judiciary on the disparaging assessments of the opinion offered by Henry Hart, Hebert Wechsler, and Alexander Bickel. This peculiar aspect of Brown has become the keystone supporting all arguments about what is excessive about the modern jurisprudence; federal courts are said to have a realist disposition producing an unbounded, relativistic, interdisciplinary judicial craft and characterized by an activist proclivity. These dual pillars …