• DOI:10.1017/S0021875800013396
• Corpus ID: 145390453

Plessy v. Ferguson Re-examined

@article{Maidment1973PlessyVF,
  title={Plessy v. Ferguson Re-examined},
  author={Richard A. Maidment},
  journal={Journal of American Studies},
  year={1973},
  volume={7},
  pages={125 - 132}
}

• R. Maidment
• Published 1 August 1973
• Political Science
• Journal of American Studies

The United States Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson falls into that category of unfortunate opinions which have few defenders. Its only supporters currently are those who affirm their belief in and advocate the merits of legally-enforced racial segregation as state social policy. This support, however, is bereft of intellectual substance and is correctly ignored or dismissed by most scholars. Reputable students of the court have without exception been unremittingly hostile to the opinion of the court, because of the presumed socially deleterious ramifications of the judgement. Furthermore, the opinion of Mr Justice Brown has been criticized for logical and legal shortcomings and has been labelled by one scholar as being an exercise in ‘conservative sociological jurisprudence’.3 It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that Brown's judgement has been misrepresented. Despite the fact that the decision gave a constitutional imprimatur to racial segregation, the logic of the opinion owes more to a philosophy of judicial restraint and respect for precedent than to a belief in conservative sociology or racial superiority. The court was in Plessy merely affirming its understanding that the Louisiana statute under review was consonant with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and was not commenting on the merits of racial segregation as governmental policy.