Legal History Commons^™

The Ironies Of Affirmative Action, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s most recent confrontation with race-based affirmative action, Fisher v. University of Texas, did not live up to people’s expectations—or their fears. The Court did not explicitly change the current approach in any substantial way. It did, however, signal that it wants race-based affirmative action to be subject to real strict scrutiny, not the watered-down version featured in Grutter v. Bollinger. That is a significant signal, because under real strict scrutiny, almost all race-based affirmative action programs are likely unconstitutional. This is especially true given the conceptual framework the Court has created for such programs—the way …

Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts On Justice Jackson And Brown, John Q. Barrett, Brad Snyder

Faculty Publications

"I think that Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." That's what Supreme Court law clerk William H. Rehnquist wrote privately in December 1952 to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson. When the memorandum was made public in 1971 and Rehnquist's Supreme Court confirmation hung in the balance, he claimed that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views, not Rehnquist's. Rehnquist was confirmed, but his explanation triggered charges that he had lied and smeared the memory of one of the Court's most revered justices. This Essay analyzes a newly discovered document—a letter Rehnquist wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, …

"Neutral" Principles: Rethinking The Legal History Of Civil Rights, 1934-1964, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper recovers Columbia Law Professor Herbert Wechsler's constitutional involvement in the long civilrights movement. Derided for criticizing Brown v. Board of Education in 1959, Wechsler first became involved in civil rights litigation in the 1930s, continued to be interested in civil rights issues in the 1940s, and argued one of the most important civil rights cases to come before the Supreme Court in the 1960s. His critique of Brown, this article maintains, derived not from a disinterest in the black struggle but from a larger conviction that racial reform should be process rather than rights-based. By recovering Wechsler's approach, …

Brown And The Colorblind Constitution, Christopher W. Schmidt

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay offers the first in-depth examination of the role of colorblind constitutionalism in the history of Brown v. Board of Education. In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1 (2007), such an examination is needed today more than ever. In this case, Chief Justice John Roberts drew on the history of Brown to support his conclusion that racial classifications in school assignment policies are unconstitutional. Particularly controversial was the Chief Justice's use of the words of the NAACP lawyers who argued Brown as evidence for his colorblind …

Thurgood Marshall And The Forgotten Legacy Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Kenneth F. Ripple

Journal Articles

On May 17, 1979, the United States celebrated, with relatively little public ceremony, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Two years earlier, another anniversary was celebrated even more quietly as Thurgood Marshall, the principal architect of the school desegregation litigation, celebrated his first decade as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Anniversaries are traditionally a time both of celebration and reflection. These particular anniversaries are appropriate occasions for celebration since each marks an important milestone in American life. At the same time, both present a unique opportunity for reflection upon and reassessment of …

The School Desegregation Cases In Retrospect—Some Reflections On Causes And Effects, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

Recently, when asked to give a lecture on appellate advocacy, Justice Thurgood Marshall reminded his audience what Judge Benjamin Cardozo had once said: "The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course and pass judges by." An outstanding example, he might have added, is Brown v. Board of Education.

In a sense, the significant changes which have occurred in the Black man's status in the last two decades had their beginnings in the rise of numerically, and hence politically, important Black communities in the North. For the importance of civil rights …