A nice Jurisprudence posting on today's Slate, by a law student and human rights worker at Harvard. An excerpt:
As America's civil rights advocates knew well a half-century ago, lawyers are most successful when their legal arguments are attuned to broader social changes. When the NAACP went to court to end segregation in the South, it coordinated with groups staging sit-ins, knowing that the resulting public unrest would help shape Thurgood Marshall's legal victories in the courtroom. This strategy works because, right or wrong, judges keep an eye on the street. Internal notes from the Supreme Court's deliberations in Brown v. Board of Education suggest the justices spent less time discussing law than chewing over the state of race relations in the South. In fact, as law professor Michael Klarman points out, little relevant constitutional law had changed between Brown's ruling against segregation and Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that helped establish the "separate but equal" school regime. What had changed was the social context.
They teach stuff like that at Harvard? What happened with Scalia--did he miss that class?
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