How
a Dissent Can Presage a Ruling:
The Case of Justice Harlan
The Brown
v. Board of Education I case was decided unanimously.
However, sometimes there are a few justices on the Supreme
Court of the United States who do not agree with the majority
decision. These justices often write dissenting opinions that
express how they disagree with the majority decision.
Though
dissents do not have the force of law that majority opinions
do, they are important because they often show the public
the battle between different interpretations of the law.
Sometimes, the dissent in one case becomes the prevailing
viewpoint in a future case that overturns an earlier decision.
One such case where a dissent presaged a future decision
occurred in the Plessy and Brown cases.
In
the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case, Justice
Harlan disagreed with the majority of his colleagues. The
majority declared that it was possible for segregated facilities
to be equal, therefore segregation did not violate the Fourteenth
Amendment. Justice Harlan wrote a dissent stating that segregation
violated the Fourteenth Amendment because it used the law
to sanction inequality among races. Later, in the Brown
v. Board of Education I (1954) case Chief Justice
Earl Warren also declared that separate facilities violated
the Constitution, though he based his argument on slightly
different premises.
Read
excerpts from Justice Harlan's dissent and Chief Justice
Warren's majority opinion. The justices clearly share the
same opinion of the constitutionality of segregation. Can
you determine how their opinions differ?
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