GOVT/SOC 4364 Civil Rights Law & Society

Fall 2005

Dr. Pamela Brandwein

Office: GR 3.526
Office Hours: Tues. 12:30-2:30pm and by appointment
Office Phone: 972/883-2934
Email: pbrand@utdallas.edu

Description: Legal decisions involving civil rights are lenses through which we can view the
history of America’s struggle over race. This course begins with the crisis over slavery 150 years
ago and works its way forward, examining the links between civil rights decisions and wider
social practices. We will cover the watershed Reconstruction Amendments that were added to the
U.S. Constitution after the Civil War, examining competing post-war interpretations of what
“equality under law” required and what it meant to “destroy” slavery. We move on to study
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the infamous decision that upheld a Jim Crow segregation statute, and
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark 20th century decision that struck down legal
segregation in education. The Heart of Atlanta and McClung Cases (1964) also receive extended
attention. These cases upheld Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited
discrimination in public accommodations. The dilemmas that confronted the Court in both the
Title II cases and Brown will be a special object of attention. The course also includes units on
the legal construction of “whiteness” in the law of naturalized citizenship in the United States and
the Japanese-American internment during WW II. Recent cases involving detainees at
Guantanamo will be discussed in the context of Korematsu v. United States, which ratified the
U.S. policy of interning Japanese-Americans during WW II. The course concludes with an in-
depth examination of Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), the decisions
involving affirmative action at the University of Michigan. A number of themes run throughout
the course, including constitutional politics, theories of race, conceptions of legal equality,
American identity, and the nature of race prejudice.

Materials :

Books:

Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (NY: Harper & Row, 1990).

Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II, Revised Edition
(Hill and Wang, 2004).

Richard Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations: The Heart of Atlanta and McClung
Cases (University Press of Kansas, 2001).

• There is a collection of required materials on Electronic Reserve at McDermott Library.

• There is another collection of required materials accessible through the Library’s Catalog
and the Lexis-Nexis Electronic Database, accessible through the Library’s Homepage.

• A number of Supreme Court cases (edited versions) are available on WebCT.

Evaluation: Two papers (30%, 30%)
In Class Essay Exam (25%)
Quizzes (15%)

For the paper assignments, you must submit two copies of your paper by the deadline. You must
give one hardcopy to me. You must submit the same paper electronically to http://turnitin.com
(Create your own user profile and then log on to the class, Civil Rights Law and Society. The
class ID number is: 1324661. The enrollment password is: Hubble. You will need this
information to create your user profile.)

Students are expected to have completed the day’s readings before class and the quizzes are
intended to encourage this. NO MAKE-UPS WILL BE GIVEN FOR QUIZZES. Lecture notes
or summaries will not be provided for missed classes. Scholastic dishonesty will not be tolerated,
and all student essays are expected to be the product of the student’s own work. Acts of
plagiarism (representing the work of another as one’s own, which includes cutting and pasting
from the Internet) are included in the definition of scholastic dishonesty. Students who violate
UTD rules on scholastic dishonesty are subject to disciplinary penalties, including the possibility
of failure in the course and/or dismissal from the University. If students have any questions on
what plagiarism means, they should consult a plagiarism tutorial found at
http://www.ctlw.duke.edu. To find out more about UTD policies and procedures regarding
scholarly dishonesty and its consequences, please refer to
http://www.utdallas.edu/student/slife/chapter49.html. Students with any questions or concerns
are encouraged to contact the professor.

Schedule of Classes :

8/18 Introduction to Course

8/23 Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Mrydal, and Hartz: The Multiple
Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review, vol.87, no.3 (1993),
549-566. [Library Catalog]

Antislavery Politics & the Reconstruction Amendments

8/25 James A. Morone, Hellfire Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),
169-215. [Electronic Reserve]

James M. McPherson, “Southern Comfort,” New York Review of Books, April 12,
2001. [Electronic Reserve]

Alexander Stephens, The Cornerstone Speech (1861) (handout)

8/30 Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, xi-xvi, 82-123, 180-198.

9/1 Michael A. Ross, Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the
Supreme Court during the Civil War Era (Louisiana State University Press,
2003), 189-210. [Electronic Reserve]
9/6 United States v. Cruikshank [WebCT]
United States v. Butler, 25 Fed. Cas. 213 (1877). [WebCT]
Ex Parte Virginia , 100 U.S. 339 (1880). [WebCT]
United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883). [WebCT]
Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). [WebCT]

9/8 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 255-299. [Electronic
Reserve]

Jim Crow and the Era of Legal Segregation

9/13 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) [Lexis-Nexis Electronic Database]

9/15 Michael J. Klarman, “The Plessy Era,” 1998 Supreme Court Review 6, 303-389.
[Electronic Reserve]

9/20 ESSAY EXAM

Belonging to America: Naturalization and the Requirement of Whiteness

9/22 Ian Haney Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (NY: NYU
Press, 1996), 49-109.[Electronic Reserve]

9/27 Eric Foner, “Who is an American” Culturefront, Winter 1995-96, pp.4-12.

[Electronic Reserve]

Japanese-American Internment & World War II

9/29 Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214, majority opinion (Black)
[Lexis-Nexis]

10/4 Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, 3-71.

10/6 Korematsu v. United States, dissenting opinions, (Murphy, Roberts)

[Lexis-Nexis]

10/11 Korematsu v. United States,(concurring by Frankfurter, dissenting by Jackson)

[Lexis-Nexis]

Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, 72-121.

The Civil Rights Era

10/13 Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the
Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004), 290-343.
[Electronic Reserve]
10/18 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) [WebCT]
Brown v. Board of Education II, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) [WebCT]

10/20 George Kateb, “Brown and the Harm of Legal Segregation,” in Austin Sarat, ed.,
Race, Law, and Culture (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997), 91-109.
[Electronic Reserve]

10/25 Jack M. Balkin, What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said (New
York University Press, 2001), 3-25. [Electronic Reserve]

10/27 PAPER DUE in class

Video, “Eyes on the Prize “No Easy Walk.”

11/1 Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, Preface, Introduction, Ch.1-3.

11/3 Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, Ch. 4-5.

11/8 Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations, Ch. 6-7.

Affirmative Action

11/10 Grutter v. Bollinger, majority opinion, 539 U.S. 306, (2003). [Lexis-Nexis]
Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) (handout)

Brief of Amici Curiae on Behalf of a Committee of Concerned Black Graduates

of ABA Accredited Law Schools, 9 Michigan Journal of Race & Law 5 (2003)
[WebCT]

11/15 Grutter v. Bollinger, dissenting opinions (Rehnquist, Kennedy, Thomas)

[Lexis-Nexis]

John Dovidio and Samuel Gaertner, “Affirmative Action, Unintentional Racial

Biases, and Intergroup Relations,” 52 Journal of Social Issues 4 (1996), 51-75.
[Electronic Reserve]

Claude Steele, “Thin Ice: Stereotype Threat and Black College Students,”
Atlantic Monthly (August 1999), 44-54. [Library Catalog]

11/17 Daniel Golden, “How Far Does Diversity Go?” Wall Street Journal, June 25,
2003 [Library Catalog]

Daniel Golden, “Buying Your Way into College,” Wall Street Journal, March
12, 2003. [Library Catalog]

Daniel Golden, “For Supreme Court, Affirmative Action isn’t Just Academic,”
Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2003. [Library Catalog]

11/22 Conclusions

Final Paper Due: Tuesday, November 29, 11am, GR 3.526.