Rubin and Elinson on Anatomy of Judicial Backlash: Southern Leaders, Massive Resistance, and the Supreme Court, 1954-1958 @LSI_Journal @NIU_Law @UChicagoPoliSci

ICYMI: Ruth Bloch Rubin, University of Chicago, and Gregory Elinson, Northern Illinois University College of Law, have published Anatomy of Judicial Backlash: Southern Leaders, Massive Resistance, and the Supreme Court, 1954–1958 at 43 Law & Soc. Inquiry 944 (2018). Here is the abstract.

Exploiting a range of archival materials, we argue that state-level variation in judicial backlash to Brown was as much the result of strategic choices by southern political elites as it was the ingrained prejudices of the region’s white voters. Presenting case studies of massive resistance in Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arkansas, we show that elite agency profoundly shaped the patchwork development of grassroots resistance to integration across the South. These findings challenge the prevailing view that backlash to Brown signaled the unequivocal triumph of racial conservatives. Rather, we argue that the region’s response offered individual members of the southern elite significant autonomy to direct massive resistance in their home states. We also argue that southern lawmakers were responsible for the South’s embrace of popular constitutionalism post-Brown, and thus that it may not have been “popular” at all. We conclude that studies of judicial backlash would do well to reevaluate the assumption that backlash is necessarily a grassroots phenomenon.

Download the article from SSRN at the link..