Description: Edited and introduced by former Supreme Court Justice Breyer's former law clerk--and accompanied by a sobering update on the state of segregated schools in America today--this volume contains the full text of Breyer's most impassioned opinion, a dissent that Justice John Paul Stevens called at the time "eloquent and unanswerable."swerable."
Review Quotes:
"The introduction provides useful context... and is itself a powerful piece of advocacy, distilling for easy absorption the points that Breyer made at considerably greater length in the dissent. (The typeset version of the dissent as issued by the Court was seventy-seven pages long, nearly twice the length of the Roberts opinion.) Bestowing on Parents Involved the new name of "the resegregation cases" (the Louisville and Seattle cases began as two separate lawsuits), Vignarajah tracks the Court's retreat from the desegregation orders that lower-court judges imposed fre-quently during the 1970s. He points out that even as the Court turned against these mandatory orders a decade later, it began at the same time to interfere with school systems and localities that embarked on such remedies voluntarily. To follow the ensuing trajectory is to step through the looking glass[.]" --New York Review of Books
"Few court decisions have had the impact, influence, and importance of Brown v. Board (1954). In Breaking the Promise of Brown, recently retired US Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer argues that the court's recent decisions vitiated Brown's power and ended up resegregating US public schools. This slim volume consists of Breyer's dissent in what he terms the "Resegregation Cases" along with two appendixes (p. 2). The first appendix contains statistics supporting the assertion that American schools are being resegregated; the second consists of sources for the dissents reprinted in the first part of the book. Although Breyer's dissents are readily available online without cost, this elegant volume would make a strong complement to James T. Patterson's Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (CH, Oct'01, 39-1142) or Michael J. Klarman's Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (2007). Recommended. General readers, advanced undergraduates through faculty, and professionals." --Choice Reviews