It doesn’t take long for the discussion to turn to Brown v. Board. Let me mention three possible responses to Jonah’s correspondent. 1) There have been several attempts to square the result (if not the reasoning) of Brown with the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. 2) There is a lively academic debate about how central a role Brown played in ending segregation. There is a respectable case to be made for the view that things really started changing only when executives and legislatures got in the act.

I’m not really a great believer in either of those two responses, although I do think them worth mentioning. What I do believe is 3) We shouldn’t conduct this debate as though the world started in 1954. Maybe an originalist view, or a restrained view of the function of the federal judiciary, leaves us without Brown. But it also leaves us without the Supreme Court’s restrictions on congressional authority to end segregation, lynching, and related evils. No Brown, but no Slaughterhouse either.