Posted by David Bernstein:
My Review of "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights":
The Yale Law Journal has posted the [1]full text of my rather lengthy
review (co-authored with my colleague Ilya Somin) of U. Va.'s Michael
Klarman's intriguing From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court
and the Struggle for Racial Equality.
Here's the abstract:
Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court
and the Struggle for Racial Equality is an important contribution
to the scholarly literature on both the history of the civil rights
struggle and judicial power more generally. Klarman argues that for
much of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court was very reluctant
to rule in favor of African-American civil rights claimants and had
little impact when it did. Klarman is right to reject traditional
accounts that greatly exaggerated the Supreme Court's willingness
and ability to protect minorities. However, he overstates his case.
The Court's views on the proper scope of African Americans' rights
periodically diverged from those of the political branches of
government. The Justices' relative insulation from political
pressure, their membership in a different generational cohort than
the median voter, the idiosyncrasies of presidential selection of
Justices, and the Justices' nationalist inclinations all help
explain this result. Moreover, in at least three types of
situations, judicial invalidation of Jim Crow legislation
significantly aided African Americans: (1) when such legislation
had solved collective action problems among racist whites, (2) when
legislation had enabled white actors to externalize the costs of
Jim Crow onto society as a whole, and (3) when laws lowered the
overall costs of maintaining Jim Crow. This Review supports these
conclusions by closely examining relevant Supreme Court decisions,
especially Progressive Era cases and Brown v. Board of Education.
References
1. http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-3/Bernstein.11.30.pdf
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