I hope that doesn't happen, and there's certainly a lot of history in the Supreme Court to suggest that justices who are appointed with one set of expectations end up completely defying them. We had the wrong people on the Supreme Court, and they set the country back decades. There was a long string of pro-business presidents of both parties that appointed Northern railroad attorneys essentially to the Supreme Court, and then you have this economic crisis and this racial crisis, and they're not equipped to deal with it. That's what happened in the 1880s and 1890s. We may well be entering a period when the Supreme Court is far more conservative than the country. I think it suggests the parallels between that era and this era. On what it's like to go through historical cases at a time when judges, justices and the Supreme Court have been in the news Politics Where Redistricting Fights Stand Across The Country Ferguson is one of the great documents in American history. He issued kind of a manifesto that went to the real heart and soul of what the law is and what the Constitution means in this country. And Harlan didn't just call them out on the law. He noted the plain language of the Constitution, which said equal protection under law in the 14th amendment is the law of the land. Harlan's dissent, which was forceful, essentially called their bluff on everything. The key line in the majority opinion says this is a law that was specifically enacted to put Black people in a separate carriage, and they said if there's any stigma here it's because Black people themselves are putting that construction on it. You go back in these cases and you try to say, well, could this be an issue in which reasonable jurists might disagree? And the answer essentially is no in Plessy v. I hate to say it, but I think notions of white supremacy, prejudice and - frankly - expediency are very visible in the majority opinion of Plessy v. Book Reviews 'Separate' Is An Eye-Opening Journey Through Some Of America's Darkest Passages

Justice john marshall harlan