• About
  • Contact
  • Staff
  • Home
  • Essays
  • Forum
  • Podcasts
  • Book Reviews
  • Liberty Classics

August 5, 2019|A Fool’s Errand, Albion Tourgée, Homer Plessy, Jim Crow, Justice Henry Billings Brown, Justice John Marshall Harlan, Plessy v. Ferguson, Privileges and Immunities Clause, Reconstruction, Separate, Steve Luxenberg

Segregation Setback: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson

by Sean A. Scott|

Everyone knew that successfully overturning Jim Crow laws was a long shot. Here are the men who tried.

March 14, 2016|Atticus Greene Haygood, Jim Crow, John Calhoun, Our Brother in Black, Russell Kirk, White Supremacy

An Alternative Southern Conservative Tradition

by James M. Patterson|

The Haygood-Hopkins Memorial Gateway at Emory University

Students at the Oxford College of Emory University can spend their semester living in Haygood Hall. The college website describes the dormitory as the “smallest, most intimate community on campus” and is the closest student residence to the dining hall. It is also named after one of the most emphatic defenders of African American education and civil liberties in Georgia during the years after Reconstruction.

Read More

March 5, 2014|Brown v. Board of Education, Jim Crow, Originalism

Why is Brown So Important?

by Mike Rappaport|

Will Baude recently raised the question, why is the result in Brown v. Board of Education so important? He writes:

In the abstract, a legal interpretive theory ought to be able to say “theories generate results; results don’t generate theories.” In other words, it is a mistake to judge an interpretive theory simply by the moral goodness of the results it produces: If one had a theory of moral goodness sufficient to judge all of the results of an interpretive theory, one may as well just use it directly. Law’s promise is the ability to transcend moral disagreement.

And yet in practice almost every constitutional theorist feels the need to say that Brown is right. The two exceptions I can think of are Adrian Vermeule and Earl Maltz, though my very very small sample size suggests that the next generation of law students may not view Brown as similarly canonical.

This is a complicated question, but part of the reason people place so much emphasis on Brown is that they make it more important than it was. They treat the issue of Brown’s constitutionality as identical with the issue of Jim Crow’s unconstitutionality. If denying Brown meant that Jim Crow was constitutional, that is an extremely uncomfortable result. Of course, one might counter (as Will suggests) that the validity of a legal theory differs from the desirability of its results, but in the context of arguing for or against originalism, the view that originalism would allow such an enormous evil as Jim Crow just appears to be extremely problematic.

It is therefore important to note that the issue of the constitutionality of Brown is not the same as the unconstitutionality of Jim Crow. Even if Brown was not the original meaning, that does not mean that most of Jim Crow was constitutional. This is a true for a variety of reasons.

Read More

Book Reviews

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

Read More

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

Read More

Liberty Classics

Rereading Politica in the Post-Liberal Moment

by Glenn A. Moots

Althusius offers a rich constitutionalism that empowers persons to thrive alongside one another in deliberate communities.

Read More

James Fenimore Cooper and the American Experiment

by Melissa Matthes

In The American Democrat, James Fenimore Cooper defended democracy against both mob rule and majority tyranny.

Read More

Podcasts

Stuck With Decadence

A discussion with Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat discusses with Richard Reinsch his new book The Decadent Society.

Read More

Can the Postmodern Natural Law Remedy Our Failing Humanism?

A discussion with Graham McAleer

Graham McAleer discusses how postmodern natural law can help us think more coherently about human beings and our actions.

Read More

Did the Civil Rights Constitution Distort American Politics?

A discussion with Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell discusses his new book, The Age of Entitlement.

Read More

America, Land of Deformed Institutions

A discussion with Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin pinpoints that American alienation and anger emerges from our weak political, social, and religious institutions.

Read More

About

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and political thought and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons. This site brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to the first principles of law in a free society. Law & Liberty considers a range of foundational and contemporary legal issues, legal philosophy, and pedagogy.

The opinions expressed on Law & Liberty are solely those of the contributors to the site and do not reflect the opinions of Liberty Fund.
  • Home
  • About
  • Staff
  • Contact
  • Archive

© 2021 Liberty Fund, Inc.

This site uses local and third-party cookies to analyze traffic. If you want to know more, click here.
By closing this banner or clicking any link in this page, you agree with this practice.Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Necessary Always Enabled

Subscribe
Get Law and Liberty's latest content delivered to you daily
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Close