Judiciary: Assignment

Assignment Due 5/9: Choose one of the Supreme Court case summaries and select a passage, write out the passage, explain how the legal decision was made, and then explain why you chose it and why you believe this case is important.

Case:   Brown v. Board of Education

Black children were denied admission to public schools attended by white children under laws requiring or permitting segregation according to the races. The white and black schools approached equality in terms of buildings, curricula, qualifications, and teacher salaries. This case was decided together with Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, and Gebhart v. Belton. (A separate but related case -- Bolling v. Sharpe -- presented the same issue in the context of the District of Columbia, which is not subject to the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment because the District is not a state.)

Passage: Judiciary

However, past decisions of judges are carried over into present cases, so before a case is decided, lawyers and judges consult past court decisions, this is known as "legal precedent," or stare decisis, since judges cannot contradict previous decisions (except in rare circumstances) the authority of past decisions has a strong hold on legal outcomes in the present. Furthermore, another feature of the American legal system are the high frequency of "plea bargains." Again, since common law allows for more interpretation, court cases can be very time consuming. To compensate for this, many cases are "plead out," meaning that the defendant will plead guilty to a lesser offense without a trial, in order to speed up the process of coming to a legal decision. Almost 80% of legal decisions in the U.S. are the result of plea bargains.

Decision making:

The decision of the case of Brown v. Board of education was decided with legal precedence from other similar cases such as; Briggs v. Elliott, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, and Gebhart v. Belton.

Significance of the case:

I chose this case because it appears to be a civil rights issue. Historically, the court system has no interest in the treatment of people; instead it was designed to maintain the economic interest of the people. The cases such as the Brown v. Board case opened changed the way law was practiced in the United States, by giving law makers and practitioners a conscious on the civil rights of the people whom make up the country.