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Brown v. Board of Education: An Empirical Reexamination of Its Effects on Federal District Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Francine Sanders
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Abstract

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A resurgent debate in the field of judicial politics has been the controversy over which has the greatest effect in decisionmaking: legal or extralegal variables. This study applies the controversy to an arena in which a consistent answer has yet to be found: federal district court reception of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that there was a great deal of variation in compliance, with southern district justices being substantially unwilling to apply the new precedent. Results found here, however, strongly suggest that the legal variable was in fact significant. Moreover, this variable was more important than region or type of case.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , 1995 , pp. 731 - 756
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1994 Western Political Science Association Meetings. I thank Henry R. Glick, John R. Vile, Stephen L. Wasby, H. Frank Way, and James P. Wenzel for their helpful criticisms.

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Cases

For a list of the cases that make up the data set, see the Appendix. Cases discussed in the text are listed here.Google Scholar
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