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Segregation And The Fourteenth Amendment, J. D. Hyman

Vanderbilt Law Review

Sociologists have rejected the old concept, enshrined in William Graham Sumner's Folkways, published in 1906, that law must come from the mores, and cannot go beyond them. It is now generally accepted that legal action, within limits, can influence ways of living. Dramatic demonstrations of the validity of the present concepts have been furnished by the extension of negro suffrage in the South and by the enlargement of federal protection of bodily security under the drive of Supreme Court decisions broadening the reach of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Equally important are the current steps to destroy the pattern of …