The Supreme Court of the United States is the first court in the history of the world to possess the authority to pass judgment on the constitutional validity of laws by law-making bodies—here Congress, state legislatures, county boards and city councils. Not surprisingly, the most controversial—and often consequential—examples of this authority have been rulings that have struck down federal laws. Much more commonly, state and local laws have been successfully challenged in the nation’s highest tribunal, of which two cases nearly 60 years apart will be examined here. In 1896, with only one dissent, the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld a Louisiana statute that required white and black citizens to sit in separate compartments or cars of railroad trains. In 1954, a unanimous court in Brown v. Board of Education struck down state-imposed racial segregation in public schools. The two cases reached opposite verdicts, yet were widely praised in their time. In this paper, the two rulings will be examined on their merits, particularly as to the question of their constitutionality, as well as for the light they shed on the status of the Supreme Court in American government and politics. Few cases have generated more controversy, but which tellingly developed more in Plessy’s demise than in its origins, while Brown’s influence remains, as we will show. More than this, the object is to illuminate what constitutes constitutional validity, taking into account what was affirmed or denied in these cases along with what, in this writer’s view, was overlooked.
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