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= = =//Brown v. Board of Education//: Anatomy of a Decision=

This wiki is an attempt to map out the legal precedent discussed in //Brown v. Board of Education//. Being a law student who is lousy at Constitutional Law, I wanted to gather and summarize major civil rights cases decided prior to 1954.

My main goal through this project was to gain an appreciation for the Court's choices in crafting its opinion in //Brown//. To what degree did precedent compel their decision? Did the Court merely wish to overturn "separate but equal" for moral reasons, and cobble together some cases in attempted justification?

Prior to the //Brown I// decision in 1954, the Court heard oral argument twice. It posed a number of questions to counsel to be briefed and argued on reargument, many of which dealt with a historical account of whether the Fourteenth Amendment was intended at its ratification to abolish segregation in public schools. In this project, I do not address the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment at all. Not only was evidence scarce and inconclusive, but the //Brown// opinion treated the historical evidence as a wash and did not factor it into resolution of the case.

This project consists of three main parts: a summary of the Brown v. Board of Education opinion, a summary of the NAACP Brief, and a set of summaries of major civil rights cases that were decided before //Brown//. In my own mind, these summaries are a sort of primer to help me understand and recall the legal precedent involved in the //Brown// decision as I worked through historical materials written about both that case and the early civil rights movement.