The Law: A Defense & an Explanation

Most critics of the U.S. Supreme Court, argues Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, see every decision in terms of their own pet love or hate. Stoutly defending the court in a speech to lawyers in conservative Phoenix, Ariz., Craig reasoned that such subjectivity "completely ignores the complex and subtle functioning of the judicial process." For perfervid critics of the "Warren Court," he then analyzed four "controversial" decisions:

>Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed school segregation and overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine that a prior court approved in 1896....