During the years following Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. district courts assumed the burden of implementing that decision across the country. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of the district court judges in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in that effort. The primary sources used are the district, appellate and Supreme Court opinions. This study concludes that many background variables used to study judicial behaviour are ineffective in this geographical area because of the homogeneity of the judges' backgrounds. But, as indicated by the Johnson appointments, a president can select judges that have a particular attitude toward an issue such as integration, if he has the desire and the political acumen to do so.

It is a well known fact that in recent years the United States Senate has increasingly become more critical of presidential appointments to the Supreme Court branch. In this thesis the author has undertaken an intensive study of the several cases between 1916 and 1930 in which, serious opposition developed to the confirmation of Supreme Court appointments. Within this period fall the unsuccessful fights against Justices Brandeis,Taft, Butler, Stone,and Hughes,and the successful opposition to Judge Parker. In each case an effort has been made to bring out the forces and arguments operative on either side of the controversy, and to establish the fundamental motivation underlying these several manifestations of senatorial discontent. The intensive study of this question has been limited to the period from 1916 to 1930. As a preliminary background, however chapter one has been devoted to a rapid survey of the confirmation struggles arising over Supreme Court appointments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in the concluding chapter, brief reference has been made to the subsequent record of Chief Justice Hughes, to illustrate the false premise upon which some of the struggles have been founded. In the concluding lines,the author has attempted to state what he believes to be the only justifiable grounds for future attacks upon presidential nominees to the Supreme Court of the United States.