This dissertation seeks to describe and explain the connection between The Supreme
Court and politics outside of the judicial system. It is a case study of the reaction to the
Brown v. Board of Education integration decision in the American South. I apply a
theoretical model of “judicialization,” arguing that when courts affect politics outside of
the judicial system, they reshape politics to resemble the adversarial legal system,
sparking polarized conflict and causing non-judicial political actors to make arguments in
the form of constitutional doctrine. Analyzing editorials and letters to the editor from
Southern newspapers, I show that debate after Brown was characterized by appeals to
constitutional principles, and that Brown increased the salience of segregation in schools
as a subject of political debate. I also supplement my Southern newspaper data with data
from African-American newspapers and analyze Southern elections in the periods
immediately before and after the education integration decision to assess the impact of
the Court’s education decision on both voters and candidates. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/7553 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
| Creators | Allen, Neal Robert |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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