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How
a Dissent Can Presage a Ruling
Some
Supreme Court cases are decided unanimously. However, sometimes
the justices do not agree with the majority decision. These
justices often write dissenting opinions that express how
and why they disagree with the majority decision.
Though
dissents do not become law as majority opinions do, they
are important because they document the struggle between
different interpretations of the law. Sometimes the dissent
in one case becomes the prevailing viewpoint in a future
case that overturns an earlier decision. A dissent presaged
a future decision in the Plessy and Brown
cases.
In
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Justice Harlan
disagreed with the majority of his colleagues. The majority
declared that it was possible for segregated facilities
to be equal, therefore segregation did not violate the Fourteenth
Amendment. Justice Harlan wrote a dissent stating that segregation
violated the Fourteenth Amendment because it used the law
to sanction inequality among races. Later, in Brown
v. Board of Education I (1954), Chief Justice Earl
Warren also declared that separate facilities violated the
Constitution, though he based his argument on slightly different
premises.
Read
excerpts from Justice Harlan's dissent
and Chief Justice Warren's majority opinion.
The
justices clearly have the same opinion of the constitutionality
of segregation. Can you determine how they differ?
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