Brown V board of education

 May it please the Court.

I represent the Board of Education of Topeka, and I want to be direct about what is — and is not — before you today. This case is not about whether segregation feels fair. It is about whether it is lawful. And on that question, this Court has spoken clearly, consistently, and repeatedly for fifty-eight years.

In 1896, this Court decided Plessy versus Ferguson. It held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees legal equality — equal standing before the law — not enforced social mixing. Justice Brown wrote that laws separating the races do not, by themselves, brand either race as inferior. If a stigma is felt, he wrote, it exists only because one side chooses to read it that way — not because the statute commands it. That is not my opinion, Your Honors. That is fifty-eight years of controlling precedent.

And Plessy did not stand alone. Three years later, in Cumming versus Richmond County Board of Education, this Court refused to interfere with a local school board's decisions about which schools to fund and operate — holding that the administration of public education is a matter for local authorities, not federal courts. In 1908, in Berea College versus Kentucky, this Court went further still, upholding a state's power to require separation even in private institutions. And in 1927, in Gong Lum versus Rice, this Court applied that same rule to a Chinese-American schoolgirl in Mississippi, writing that the question of school assignment "has been many times decided" to rest within state authority.

Four cases. Six decades. Every one of them reaching the same conclusion: separate facilities, equally provided, satisfy the Constitution. That is not a fringe theory, counsel — that is settled law.

Now, my colleagues will ask you to look past that precedent, to studies of children and dolls, to sociology and psychology, to how segregation makes a child feel. Your Honors, I ask you — since when does this Court decide constitutional questions by social science rather than by the text these thirty-eight states ratified? The Fourteenth Amendment's framers themselves maintained segregated schools in the District of Columbia. If the amendment's own authors did not understand it to prohibit separate schooling, what warrant does this Court have, ninety years later, to discover that meaning now?

This is not a question of whether segregation is wise policy. Reasonable people, even members of this Court, may disagree about that. But wisdom is not this Court's business. That question belongs to the elected legislatures of Kansas, of South Carolina, of Virginia — bodies accountable to voters, not to nine appointed judges. If the people of this country have concluded that the era of separate schooling should end, the Constitution gives them a clear path: the amendment process, or their state legislatures. It does not give that power to this Court.

What the plaintiffs ask you to do today is not to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment — it is to rewrite it. To discard six decades of settled precedent, precedent this Court itself built case by case, on the strength of a psychologist's inkblots and dolls rather than the words the framers wrote.

We ask this Court to do what courts are built to do: apply the law as it stands, respect its own precedent, and leave to the legislatures the policy judgments the Constitution reserves for them.

Plessy was right in 1896. Nothing has changed the text of the Fourteenth Amendment since. And nothing before this Court today justifies casting aside fifty-eight years of settled law.

Thank you.