If modern constitutional law has a bedrock rule, it is this:
Brown v. Board of Education was correctly decided. To argue,
even to imply, that the Supreme Court erred when it ended school
segregation in 1954 is to exile oneself from respectable
constitutional debate. "Such is the moral authority of Brown,"
constitutional scholar Michael McConnell wrote in 1995, "that if
any particular theory does not produce the conclusion that Brown
was correctly decided, the theory is seriously discredited."
Reason and Imagination Edited by Constance Jordan Oxford, 435
pages, $39.95 Only one jurist has condemned Brown without losing
his reputation, and he accomplished that feat only because he
had established himself as one of the greatest judges in
American history. In 1958, near the end of his half-century of
service on the federal bench, New York's Judge Learned Hand used
a Harvard lecture series to criticize what he saw as the Supreme
Court's unprincipled judicial activism in desegregating the
schools. Yet just three yea