Bad Behavior Makes Big Law: Southern Malfeasance and the Expansion of Federal Judicial Power, 1954-1968

The title of this post comes from this paper arguing that the Warren Court's confrontations with Jim Crow and Southern legal authorities more expansively transformed American jurisprudence than contemporary narratives suggest. Here's the abstract:

The story of the Warren Court’s impact on the U.S. South is of course far larger and more wide-ranging than just the direct legacy of Brown v. Board of Education. Indeed, this is a question of not just “Beyond Brown,” or, better yet, “Beyond Brown and Baker,” but of appreciating how the obstructive behavior of the South, in the face of Warren Court rulings, affected the wider judicial decision-making of the Court just as much as the Court’s holdings altered so many aspects of southern life, both public and private.

Brown is a major part of that story, as is Baker and its decisive, Deep South progeny, Reynolds v. Sims. Yet there are at least four other important and often-overlooked chapters in this story as well: first, the Court’s own frightful and halting behavior in other, little-known and sometimes tragic race cases in the immediate wake of Brown; second, the ways in which the Court’s belief in racial equality significantly spurred its efforts to reform criminal justice procedures nationwide; third, the tremendously under-appreciated manner in which the activism of the southern Black freedom struggle stimulated the Court to vastly expand federal judicial jurisdiction in ways that helped protect the constitutional rights of any citizen prosecuted in a southern state court; and fourth, the degrees to which even ostensibly unrelated areas of substantive federal law, ranging from First Amendment rights of association, to the law of libel, to the procedural protections afforded public aid recipients, all were likewise transformed on account of the collision between the Warren Court and white public authorities in the South. All told, that larger story is one whose scope far exceeds the standard narrative about Brown and race, or even the more expansive one about Brown and Baker’s explicitly shared grounding in the fundamental guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause.