Constitutional Literacy: Plessy and Brown in the Writing Class

Abstract

publication of James Boyd White's textbook emphasizing the value of literature for teaching legal writing. In 1987 Richard Weisberg produced his own textbook, and a productive debate has arisen as to the proper way to draw on literature to teach lawyers how to write. There is even an international component to the field: a legal writing course at the University of Sydney draws on the work of Peter Goodrich, a British law and literature scholar. But even though courses in law and literature are taught around the globe in literature departments as well as law schools, the field of rhetoric and composition has not taken full advantage of legal in the teaching of writing. To be sure, people at the University of Texas, Austin, tried to design a class based on antidiscrimination law and court rulings on discrimination lawsuits (Brodkey 240), only to meet political resistance. One of the worst consequences of the highly publicized debate over the Texas experiment has been to make it difficult for teachers to draw on a valuable resource for the teaching of writing without seeming as if they are taking a stand in a polemical and partisan debate. Nonetheless, in isolated, noncontroversial situations people have drawn on legal in introductory writing courses with great success. For instance, a writing course at Harvard is based on a few texts from important civil rights cases (Marius 476). At the University of California, Irvine, I have used a unit on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in a required course that 92 percent of the students would recommend to a friend (see Thomas, Teaching the Conflicts). The purpose of this essay is to provide a model for the use of legal in the writing class by sharing reasons for the success of that unit.