In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that state laws mandating segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

Five years later — in the wake of a coordinated campaign of southern “massive resistance” to court-ordered integration — legal scholar Herbert Wechsler expressed his doubts about whether the Court’s holding in Brown “really turned upon the facts” to a lecture audience at Harvard Law School. Instead, he believed that “it must have rested on the view that racial segregation is, in principle, a denial of equality.”

Wechsler, a liberal opposed to segregation, feared that Brown’s outcome sprang from a consideration of moral principles rather than canons of legal reasoning. He insisted that judicial probity meant refusing to allow political commitments to drive legal decision-making, fearing that the Court risked losing its institutional legitimacy if it addressed contentious political issues directly.