A STORM OVER THIS COURT: LAW POLITICS, AND SUPREME COURT DECISION-MAKING IN BROWN v. BOARD of EDUCATION


by Jeffrey D. Hockett. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 280pp. Cloth $39.50. ISBN: 978-0-8139-3374-0

Reviewed by Ronald Kahn, Department of Politics, Oberlin College. Email: Ronald.Kahn [at] oberlin.edu.

pp.568-578

When I saw the announcement of the Hockett book I wondered what additional scholarship could be written about BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION (1954). But I was intrigued by Hockett’s creative approach to the case, so I ordered A STORM OVER THIS COURT: LAW, POLITICS, AND SUPREME COURT DECISION MAKING IN BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION from the University of Virginia Press. I am delighted that I did so. This book is not simply about BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, it is a book that asks whether any one of the many different approaches used by political scientists to explain Supreme Court decision-making can explain why the Supreme Court in BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION unanimously decided to declare racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

Chapter 1, “Barriers to Desegregation,” is a superb analysis of the main components of the arguments used by the petitioners for the school children and the respondents for the school boards. We see in Hockett’s analysis the fight over whether the Court should make its decision based on an Originalist or a Living Constitution interpretation of the Constitution, what the facts demonstrate about the effects of segregation on the children, and the place of public education in the lives of children as future citizens in the time of the passage of the 14th Amendment, PLESSEY V. FERGUSON (1896), and at the time this case was to be decided. At each stage of this analysis, the reader is witness to the degree to which each side was confident that their arguments would prevail before the Court. This book is based on painstaking research on a wide range of materials, including justices’ memoirs, memoranda, correspondence, and draft opinions, and a meticulous reading of the scholarship on the BROWN case and the methods used, particularly by political scientists, to explain the outcome. Hockett demonstrates a mature, sophisticated and respectful understanding of qualitative and quantitative research methods, ranging from interpretive methods used by scholars of historical institutionalism to the most recent methods used by behavioral political scientists.

This book is a masterful test of whether any one of these approaches can explain the BROWN decision, in light of this meticulous evidence. In this book we also see whether BROWN can be explained by political factors external to the Court, including those considered by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, short- and long-term effects of their actions on the prospects [*569] of the Democratic and Republican Party, respectively, in the future, the impact of segregation on the Cold War, to name but a few that Hockett considers. In each chapter, the reader gets to consider how internal legal and doctrinal concerns, including precedent, and external political concerns, including the possibility of social conflict and stonewalling by states during the implementation of a decision, should the Court find racial segregation in schools to be unconstitutional. Hockett also follows in most precise terms differences among members of the interpretive community as to the constitutionality of racial segregation in schools before BROWN was decided, and afterwards, with particular regard to whether the Court would be viewed as political in its decision-making.

In Chapter 2, “The Attitudes of Justices,” Hockett asks whether the attitudinal approach, which is based on the assumption that justices follow their preexisting policy and ideological stances, can explain the BROWN decision. He also considers whether BROWN can be explained, as Michael J. Klarman does, through arguing that the Court was responding to deep-seated political, social, economic, and ideological trends in favor of racial equality at mid-century. Based on a painstaking look at evidence on each justice, Hockett responds to both the explanation of BROWN by Klarman and the attitudinalists. He writes, “Simply put, if liberals [on and off the Court] were not even thinking seriously about race in America before mid-century, it may be that greater specificity in the measurement of Supreme Court nominees’ views on racial equality was not even possible until the post-war period” (p.55). Moreover, if one says that justices follow policy preferences (attitudinalism) then in BROWN Justices Clark, Black and Reed ruled contrary to their policy preferences, and school segregation was not in the policy spectrum of the other justices on the Court.

In Chapter 2 and later chapters Hockett demonstrates that the decision process on the Court, in light of its institutional norms and legal principles, and not outside Court factors that many political scientists emphasize, including attitudinalists, best explain the BROWN case. In so doing, Hockett demonstrates a deep and nuanced command of a stunningly wide range of political science, historical, and legalist approaches to explaining Court decision-making, tests them in terms of BROWN – and finds all of them as wanting as a sole explanation for the BROWN decision. This is especially true if they neglect the importance of the impact of the process within the Court on preference formation. Hockett’s analysis of the data and methods used by attitudinalists demonstrates a deep understanding of behavioral methods, and an understanding of how behavioralists disagree on data and methods, and are coming to realize that preference formation on the Court, not simply external political and historical factors, inform Court decision-making.

All explanations for the BROWN decision are tested through a painstaking analysis of the activities and words of each of the justices both before their selection to the Court and during the selection process, and their words and Court opinions and the trends in their decision-making while on the Court. Hockett provided a precise [*570] comparison of the timing of words and actions, in light of explanations used by political scientists to explain Court decision-making. For example, Hockett notes that being a Northern liberal in the late 1940s did not imply support for an end to racial segregation in the schools. This finding raises questions as to whether liberals on the Court would support an end to race segregation and whether the Court was following trends in the wider society in support of the ends to school segregation.

Moreover, one cannot explain unanimous voting in BROWN as justices’ following the will of liberal senators or presidents at the time of their nomination because liberals had little to say about race when most of justices on the BROWN Court were selected. Also, nominees who received less progressive ideological designations by attitudinalists would not have been assumed to favor segregation for similar reasons. Hockett demonstrates that the writings and speeches of the justices who joined the court before the end of World War II lacked specific content regarding matters of race, and thus are of no use as an alternative means of inferring the justices’ attitudes on desegregation. Hockett shows that the same can be said of writings and speeches of two of the three justices on the BROWN Court appointed in the post-war period. Also, Hockett finds that with one exception, post-confirmation communications written prior to BROWN do not afford insight into policy preferences regarding desegregation. Hockett concludes, “So, unless social scientists develop an alternative method of attitude measurement that is not restricted to living persons, an attitudinal account of BROWN will remain a matter of conjecture rather than empirical proof” (p.55).

Hockett ends Chapter 2 with a creative analysis of the impact of ideological drift on whether attitudinalism can explain justices’ decisions. Hockett demonstrates that ideology is not stable; policy preferences shift over the course of a justice’s career. Hockett finds that five members of Court – Reed, Frankfurter, Black, Jackson and Burton – became significantly more conservative in the years after their first term. Three Justices Warren, Clark, and Douglas – became significantly more liberal during their years on the Court. Since the Court was unanimous in the BROWN decision, the finding of ideological drift provides important evidence that questions the validity of the attitudinal approach. However, it does not provide an explanation for BROWN. That is provided in subsequent chapters.

Hockett explores the pioneering behavioral work of Glendon Schubert in the 1960’s and David W. Rhode, Harold J. Spaeth and Jeffrey A. Segal in later decades who emphasize Supreme Court justices are policy makers who make instrumental arguments based on their personal policy preferences. He finds this “attitudinal” approach wanting, and later chapters build on this finding. There also is a fine discussion of C. Neal Tate’s link of votes to personal attributes of justices. Hockett links up Tate’s argument to actual histories of the BROWN justices. He makes a complex technical argument about dependent and independent variables in Tate’s work understandable to the reader, even to undergraduates in my view. He shows that reference to attribute models (like Tate’s) for indirect measures of the [*571] policy preferences of the justices involved in BROWN cannot solve the problem of circularity in the attitudinal account of that decision. He also does a terrific job in demonstrating the problem of indirectly measuring the attitudes or policy preferences of justices by content analysis of statements in newspaper editorials on the nomination of a justice.

In this chapter, as in others, the reader is offered a quite detailed but very readable discussion of complex methodological and scholarly issues. A most important part of this chapter is the argument that attitudinalism does not support the outcome in BROWN. Nor does polling data in the late 1940s and 1950s or the actions of elected officials as signals to the Court (discussed below) support the outcome in BROWN.

Thus, a real strength of the book is the testing of the quite different approaches used by political scientists, and the sources of data used in their support, to explain Court decision-making in general, and BROWN in particular. I realize that for some methodologists, an N of one case, in this book BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, cannot provide an adequate basis to test their model of Supreme Court decision-making. However, scholars of all methods, including attitudinalists, have written about whether individual cases fit their models, and, more particularly, whether the landmark BROWN case fits their model; most often they find that it does.

Chapter 3, “Law, Anticipated Violence, and Loyalty to the Court,” explores whether justices act strategically in the decision-making process. Hockett writes, “The strategic model, which scholars developed in response to perceived deficiencies in the attitudinal model, posits that justices, while primarily seekers of policy, are constrained in the pursuit of that objective by both internal and external factors. Hockett’s criticism of the strategic model, as he defines it, is limited by institutional context, such as conference deliberations, the notes from which show that “the Court settled for delayed enforcement, and thus an approximation of their policy preferences, because they anticipated a violent reaction to a desegregation decree” (p.59). Moreover, evidence from conference notes, memos, and memoirs, shows that some justices, and not simply Justice Reed, voted against their policy preferences, in part because of their loyalty to the Court, a topic discussed both in Chapters 3 and 4, “A Sense of the Court’s Mission.”

Hockett presents a nuanced analysis of how internal Court constraints, such as efforts to promote collegiality, bargaining, and appeals to institutional loyalty influenced how the Court constructed the BROWN decisions. The draft opinions are juxtaposed with other written evidence from the justices on the process. The reader gets an excellent look at what the members of the Court were thinking as they decided BROWN. Hockett is superb in demonstrating the limits of the strategic model, while respecting the objectives of such an approach.

Hockett also finds that exogenous constraints, such as anticipated social intransigence to desegregation, the pressure of public opinion, and the public and scholars’ viewing a decision against segregation as a denial of the [*572] rule of law and the Court’s status as a legal, rather than a political, institution, do not alone explain the votes of most justices. Nearly all justices spoke about the Court expecting and responding to social resistance to an anti-segregation decision. However, none of the justices who had concerns about resistance to a decision outlawing school segregation or of the need to demonstrate fidelity to the rule of law, voted to sustain segregation. These concerns influenced the implementation decision; however, they were not central to the decision to overturn PLESSY and to declare unconstitutional racial segregation in schools. Moreover, the evidence in this and the other chapters suggest that the final decisions by the justices in both BROWN decisions were primarily or simply a reflection of the justices’ pre-conceived attitudes to the policy of segregation or ideological commitments.

Chapter 4, “A Sense of the Court’s Mission,” is creative and original. Hockett asks whether an instrumental approach to Court decision-making, such as attitudinalism, or a constitutive approach, such as is employed by new institutional scholars, explain the BROWN decision. This approach “posits that justices are socialized to consider cues for normatively appropriate judicial behavior from relevant legal actors and institutions” (p.93). Hockett draws upon a wide range of scholarship to define the major parameters of the constitutive approach that highlights the fact that preference formation occurs during Court decision-making.

More specifically, Hockett makes a well-documented argument that that Warren’s strong support of the need to end racial segregation in schools was not, as attitudinalism would suggest, the result of his acting according to values and positions on public policy that he had before he came to the Court. Hockett shows that his personal history, including his years as Governor of California, revealed little inclination or desire to respond aggressively to the problem of racial injustice. The fact that he continued to defend the KOREMATSU decision eight years after BROWN, and other evidence presented by Hockett, suggest that BROWN cannot be explained by Warren’s critical self-awareness of the racism in the Japanese internment. Rather, Hockett argues that Chief Justice Warren was acting in terms of his view of what the proper institutional norms of the Court should be in light of its place in the American political system and role as an institution in the wider process of American political development. Of particular note was Warren’s view of the Court’s mission in racial discrimination cases in light of the failures of political institutions at the national and state levels, a concern that is highlighted by the constitutive decision-making process of the Supreme Court.

For example, Hockett does a masterful job of exploring the view of Justices Black, Jackson, and other Justices that the Supreme Court, and courts generally, must be havens of refuge to protect the politically weak generally, and African-Americans in particular, given our nation’s history. Moreover, the constitutive process links legal arguments made in the past to the Court role in the present. I found especially convincing the argument that petitioners did an effective job of informing Justice Black of the legal implications of the insight that segregation is part of the system of racial oppression. Hockett [*573] writes, “They reminded Black, who had authored the majority opinion in KOREMATSU V. UNITED STATES, of what he had said in that case – that racial classifications are ‘immediately suspect’” (p.120).

As in the other chapters, Hockett is superb in his analysis of the pertinent literature on the constitutive approach. The scholarship on the constitutive nature of Supreme Court decision-making by C. Herman Pritchett, Rogers Smith, Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, Cornell Clayton, and Keith Whittington, come alive, as Hockett tests out their scholarly problematics. .

The evidence, particularly with regard to how both BROWN decisions were constructed, after much debate, supports Hockett’s conclusion that Supreme Court justices are not primarily attitudinal in their decision-making. They think in terms of rights and justice and the Court’s mission, through a constitutive process in which the process makes a difference as to their final constitutional choices.

In Chapter 5, “The Relevance of Foreign Affairs,” and Chapter 6, “Domestic Political Considerations, Hockett tests the “political regimes” model for explaining Supreme Court decision-making. Hockett writes, “Individuals who champion a ‘political regimes’ model of Supreme Court decision-making – an approach that combines a non-instrumental sensibility with the understanding that the Court is one point in a pattern of institutional relationships that constitute a political regime – provide reason to believe the justices also looked to the executive branch for cues regarding normatively appropriate judicial behavior in BROWN.” Under the “political regimes” approach, Court decisions are not viewed as discrete acts, but are embedded within the broader political system or political regime that gives institutional components their meaning. Hockett tests the political regimes approach with regard to the premise that Truman Administration concerns (as stated in amicus briefs) that segregation undermined our nation’s fighting of the Cold war, influenced the votes against continuing school segregation (p.127).

Hockett centers Chapter 5 on a detailed, rigorous, analysis of the scholarship of Mary Dudziak, “who borrowing from the insights of Derrick A. Bell, Jr., believes that the desegregation decision was a ‘Cold War imperative’” (p.131). Hockett tests this premise using a wide range of materials from the Court decision-making process and the political world outside the Court. Hockett finds that Earl Warren’s decision in support of school desegregation does not corroborate the view that BROWN is the result of an executive inspired Cold War imperative. Precise and clear reasons are offered for a similar finding with regard to Justice Douglas. One can make a similar conclusion for Justices Reed and Jackson, who were adamant that “arguments of policy” are irrelevant to the matter of the constitutionality of the practice [of segregation]” (p.137).

A most interesting analysis is made of the relevance of foreign policy considerations to the decisions by Truman nominees Clark, Burton, and Minton. , Pre-Court actions and views of each justice are explored and compared with what each did during the decision-[*574] making process on the Court. For example, actions taken by Justice Clark, who was attorney general in the Truman Administration, especially with regard to the pre- BROWN segregation in higher education cases, are juxtaposed with Clark’s “conviction that segregation served a necessary function [of limiting social unrest] in the South” (p.142). Each justice’s voting in cases on Civil Rights is compared to First Amendment cases between 1953 and 1975. Hockett finds that for Justices Minton and Clark there is a significant drop-off in liberal voting on First Amendment cases. Hockett concludes that this difference and their votes in BROWN are part of “a broader voting pattern that suggested a marked concern with the need to meet the Communist threat” (p.144). Thus, Hockett finds that, at varying levels of certainty, there is evidence that the pertinence of foreign policy considerations to the desegregation votes of Justices Minton, Burton, and Clark, consistent with Truman’s argument that segregation must be ended because it hurt the nation in the Cold War.

Chapter 6, “Domestic Political Considerations,” continues to test whether the “political regimes” model provides a sufficient and adequate explanation for the BROWN decision. Hockett presents a detailed analysis of the political regime models of Robert Dahl, Martin Shapiro, Kevin McMahon, and Mark Graber. He finds them all wanting.

Hockett questions the validity of Dahl’s notion that the Supreme Court is inevitably a part of “the dominant national alliance” (p.149) and because of the confirmation process it is never for long out of line with the policy views of the President and law making majorities of the United States. Hockett finds that the Eisenhower Administration’s amicus brief and “court requested participation in oral argument during the rehearing of BROWN in 1953” was not conclusive evidence that the justices understood that the Eisenhower Administration favored school desegregation. Hockett finds the “totality of circumstances and events preceding and surrounding the administration’s involvement in oral argument sent conflicting signals to the justices” (p.150). Mixed signals were also visible in the election campaign of 1952. Hockett writes, “Indeed Eisenhower gave Warren reason to suspect that the leader of the dominant national alliance harbored a covert racism, as opposed to a weakly held set of desegregation norms as Dahl would have it” (p.153).

Hockett also tests Kevin J. McMahon’s contention that “ BROWN was not intended simply to reward black voters; rather, the decision was supposed to help the executive branch alter the nature of the Democratic party” (p.159). Hockett views McMahon as seeing BROWN as the culmination of a process begun in the mid-1930s by FDR to undermine southern democracy, the abuses of white supremacy, and conservative southern Democrats’ opposition to an empowered national executive.

Hockett finds little evidence to support McMahon’s thesis that BROWN can be explained by efforts of Democratic Party elites (and FDR) to alter the base of the Democratic Party and the power of southern Democrats in the New Deal Coalition. Indeed, Hockett notes it had become clear to Democratic leaders that a civil rights agenda risked the [*575] destruction of the New Deal Coalition. Even the FDR appointees on the Court did not have party politics and change in mind when they decided BROWN.

Hockett is superb in his exploration of a wide set of materials on the party politics during the FDR, Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, on the justices nominated by these presidents, and the decision-making process in BROWN. He demonstrates that in ruling against school segregation the Justices were doing more than altering the Democratic New Deal Coalition; they were possibly sacrificing their Party’s political future. They had reason to anticipate that such a decision would lead to intra-party and sectional conflicts far more profound than those witnessed in 1952 and 1948, and which did occur in the 1960s. Truman was fearful as to the political effects on the Democratic Party if it pursued robust policies against race discrimination in the South. The abandonment of the Democratic Party by Southern whites had started well before BROWN, and the Justices could well believe that a weak implementation decision would stop this process.

Mark Graber’s innovative reinterpretation of Robert Dahl’s political regimes model in general, and with regard to Dahl’s explanation of BROWN, emphasizes that the Court at times in history is invited to make decisions when the dominant national coalition is unable or unwilling to settle some public dispute. Therefore, in BROWN, there is an opportunity for party moderates to gain victory from the Court that does not damage the dominant national coalition or existing party system. However, Hockett finds no evidence in the conference notes, memos, drafts of opinions, or in secondary materials, that the justices ruled against segregation because they thought that politicians wanted them to do so. Southern congressmen and presidents were not seeking the help of the Court to resolve the segregation question. Most importantly for Hockett, most justices prior to appointment to the Court had no opinion on school segregation. Therefore, the justices were not in a dialogue with the needs of the Eisenhower Administration or Southerners in the Senate or Congress.

For Hockett, the major problem with the political regime model, in all its forms, is its failure to respect the importance of the legal process and professional norms as an explanation the Court’s decision in BROWN. These include the impact of precedents, such as those outlawing segregation in higher education, the institutional norms of the Court, such as the mission of the Court in defining individual rights when majoritarian political institutions fail minorities, and the professional norms as to what it means to be a participant in a legal, rather than simply a political institution.

In several chapters Hockett explores the view of Michael J. Klarman that “deep-seated political, social, economic, and ideological forces” “rendered possible the [judicial] transformation of large areas of constitutional doctrine” (p.40). By “excavating and exposing these potent, yet often intangible, background forces,” Hockett views Klarman as viewing BROWN as not only “congruent with [but also] … dependent upon the broad sweep of historical forces” (p.40). For Klarman, because constitutional law is generally quite indeterminant, Court decision-making reflects the broader [*576] social and political context of the times, and the values of judges generally reflect the broader social values. For Klarman, therefore, when the Court acts, as in BROWN, it is not counter-majoritarian. Hockett finds evidence that that liberalized judicial attitudes on race were not established before the Court took up the matter.

This book is superb at demonstrating that many of the approaches to explaining Supreme Court decision-making fail as explanations for BROWN. He finds instrumental, as compared to constitutive approaches to Court decision-making most wanting. Hockett also emphasizes that scholars who argue for the importance of the constitutive nature of Court decision-making, that is, against primarily attitudinal and strategic explanations of Court decision-making, need to make their claims by employing as much empirical rigor as possible. This book is a fine example of this scholarly objective.

Moreover, one must try to explain what justices do in a case through linking the case to historical forces not only at the time of the case, but also in the lives of the justices before they reach the Court. Scholars must move behind simply instrumental assumptions about the decisions made by justices. Hockett demonstrates that ideological drift, prior cases, ideas developed about the mission of the Court, the preference-formation process on the Court, and norms about what it means to be a responsible professional justice work against instrumental decision-making. Moreover, for some justices’ instrumental and non-instrumental objectives coincide. Thus, patterns of judicial behavior are often consistent with multiple goal orientations by justices.

Not all explanations for Court action fit all cases. Hockett demonstrates that “there is no documentation that conclusively links the New Dealers’ desegregation votes to Roosevelt’s constitutional vision.” However, the strategic model is needed to explain BROWN, especially with regard to Warren’s strategic calculations to get a unanimous Court decision, through bargaining on the language and arguments used in BROWN and the implementation decision. Hockett does a superb job in demonstrating that non-instrumental perspectives are especially relevant for explaining BROWN. He also demonstrates “that baldly instrumental rulings were not an inevitable consequence of the Warren Court’s non-originalist decision-making”(p.193). Moreover, all decisions have legal, strategic, and attitudinal components, as Graber and Rogers Smith argue. It is the role of the scholar to do the best job possible to explore the role of each of these elements in Court decision-making.

Hockett has done a superb job doing so in this creative, original and important contribution to a wide range of scholarly literatures: Supreme Court decision-making; interpretive and behavioral methods of analysis; the relationship of law and politics; the relationship of history and Court action; originalist and non-originalist theories of constitutional interpretation; and the history of the Warren Court and our nation since the New Deal.

Finally, I note that reading Professor Hockett’s STORM OVER THIS COURT [*577] provided to me important theoretical and methodological insights, and evidence about the nature of Court decision-making, that are of use in a book I am currently writing with a working title of “Constructing Individual Rights on the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts: Explaining Why the Supreme Court Expands Individual Rights in a Conservative Age.” I say this in part because Hockett has placed the BROWN case as part of a story of American political development, which is the major framework in political science to counter a behavioral or attitudinal account of Court action. In doing so, Hockett provides clear and convincing evidence of the importance role of the Court’s decision-making process in the shaping of justices’ preferences and decisions in cases – as it will in determining whether the nascent individual rights of liberty, that five justices in FEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT BUSINESS V. SEBELIUS (2012) favor under the Commerce Clause, will survive in the future.

Unfortunately, far too many political scientists who seek to explain Supreme Court decision-making rely on factors external to the Court, without testing how far external factors alone can explain Court action. The most important contribution of this book is Hockett’s explanation of why relying on such external factors fails to explain Court action. To do it through an analysis of BROWN V. BOARD (1954) adds to the importance of this contribution.

Hockett has done a superb job of trying to understand and explain BROWN in light of the history and politics of our nation, the particular qualities of Supreme Court decision-making, the history of each Justice before they joined the Court and their pre- BROWN decisions while on the Court. He finds that central to explaining BROWN is the process of preference formation which takes place on the Court and the fact that the Court is a legal institution In so doing, Hockett convincingly demonstrates that the emphasis that most political scientists place on external factors to explain Court decisions, is not warranted, in the BROWN case in particular, as well as more generally.

REFERENCES:

Dahl, Robert A. 1957. “Decision Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as National Policy Maker,” 7 Journal of Public Law 279

Dudziak, Mary I. 2000. COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS: RACE AND THE IMAGE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Graber, Mark A. 1993. “The Nonmajoritarian Difficulty: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary.” 7 STUDIES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT: 35-73.

Kahn, Ronald. 2006. “Social Constructions, Supreme Court Reversals, and American Political Development: LOCHNER, PLESSY, BOWERS, But Not ROE.” In THE SUPREME COURT AND AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT. In Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch (eds.). Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas: 67-113.

Kahn, Ronald. 2013. “The Commerce Clause and Executive Power: [*578] Exploring Nascent Individual Rights in NATIONAL FEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT BUSINESSES V. SEBELIUS,” 73 UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND LAW REVIEW Number 1: 101-152.

Klarman, Michael J. 2004. FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS: THE SUPREME COURT AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY. New York: Oxford University Press.

McMahon, Kevin J. 2004. RECONSIDERING ROOSEVELT ON RACE: HOW THE PRESIDENCY PAVED THE ROAD TO BROWN. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CASE REFERENCES:

BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

NATIONAL FEDERATION OF INDEPENDENT BUSINESS V. SEBELIUS, 132 S. Ct. 2566 (2012)


Copyright 2013 by the author, Ronald Kahn