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Full-Text Articles in Law and Race
Race Nuisance: The Politics Of Law In The Jim Crow Era, Rachel D. Godsil
Race Nuisance: The Politics Of Law In The Jim Crow Era, Rachel D. Godsil
Michigan Law Review
This Article explores a startling and previously unnoticed line of cases in which state courts in the Jim Crow era ruled against white plaintiffs trying to use common law nuisance doctrine to achieve residential segregation. These "race-nuisance" cases complicate the view of most legal scholarship that state courts during the Jim Crow era openly eschewed the rule of law in service of white supremacy. Instead, the cases provide rich social historical detail showing southern judges wrestling with their competing allegiances to both precedent and the pursuit of racial exclusivity. Surprisingly, the allegiance to precedent generally prevailed. The cases confound prevailing …
The Warren Court And Desegregation, Robert L. Carter
The Warren Court And Desegregation, Robert L. Carter
Michigan Law Review
When Chief Justice ·warren assumed his post in October 1953, the underpinnings of the "separate but equal" concept had become unmoored beyond restoration. Full-scale argument on the validity of apartheid in public education was only weeks away, and the portent of change in the constitutional doctrine governing American race relations was unmistakable. Although the groundwork had been carefully prepared for the Chief Justice's announcement in Brown v. Board of Education that fundamental principles forbade racial segregation in the nation's public schools, the decision, when it was delivered on :May 17, 1954, was more than a break with the past. In …