Negro Education and the Equal Protection of the Laws

Abstract

Constitutional law in the United States has not grown and developed in a legal vacuum. Extra-legal factors have influenced the course of constitutional interpretation to an appreciable degree, serving to give substantive meanings to mere legal abstractions. Abstractions, like the equal protection of the laws and due process of law, have been applied by the courts under the doctrine of stare decises to case after case until a pattern of law has emerged which possesses a wide breadth of utility and practical application. Concrete translation of abstract law into judicial rules and regulations are necessarily conditioned by environmental elements of time and place. The process of reading positive meaning into the abstractions is a matured and stabilized process in American jurisprudence, but the results of the process in action are ever changing to meet the social, political, and economic needs of the time, and to perpetuate the nation and its constitutional law. The eminent commentator on nineteenth century politics, James Bryce, in his The American Commonwealth made the following observation of the Supreme Court: