Tangled Up in Brown

Abstract

author defends the opinion of the Court in Brown v. Board of Education as an example of the judicial process properly applied. In particular, he rejects the critique of Brown as weakly reasoned or as premised on a misapplication or misunderstanding of the facts, including sociological facts, or the law. He sums up his discussion as follows, The doctrine that emerges from Brown is narrow, but it resolves the case and does so on what ought to be relatively non-controversial principles of equal protection. Thus although Brown may not contain much law, it does contain precisely the amount necessary to resolve the problem presented to the Court. To sum up, the Court, operating from a morally justifiable sense of injustice, got the facts right, the law right, and arrived at the correct result.