Thomas Sowell on the Brown Decision

I tend not to read the writings of pundits, liberal or conservative, because I find them too prone to spin and rhetoric and not prone enough to serious data collection and analysis. As a result, I find Thomas Sowell fascinating. He produces a higher level of analysis, with better data underlying it, and that makes him worth reading.

We’re approaching the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, and this week Sowell has been doing a retrospective on the decision, attempting to analyze its effects–positive, neutral, and negative.

It’s in three parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The series is worth reading, though I think it’s weakest part is the third. It’s interesting, but I don’t know how much it has to do with Brown. In the piece, Sowell links the Brown decision to the era of judicial activism–which would be better termed “judicial legislation”–that it introduced. I don’t know that I buy that. While it’s true that Brown stood at the beginning of a major upturn in the amount of judicial legislation going on by the Supreme Court, I don’t know that this can be said to be an effect of Brown. It seems to me that one could equally well say that the Warren Court was simply more willing to legislate from the bench than prior courts and that Brown was just an early effect of this underlying tendency, not a cause of the judicial legislation that followed.

It’s been a while, though, since I did a lot of reading on the history of the Court, so that could be wrong. It could be that the Brown decision emboldened the court to engage in judicial legislation and established a willingness to engage in it that had not previously existed. I’d have to go to research to try to figure out which is the case and, since I haven’t done that research, I’ll be content for now with pointing out both possibilities.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin