Brown’s Legacy: The Promises and Pitfalls of Judicial Relief

Brown v. Board of Education marked a turning point for both civil rights and judicial activism. During the half century since Brown, social activists of all kinds have sought policy changes from the courts rather than legislatures. That trend has produced social benefits but, over time, it has also shifted political power to elites. This essay explores the possibility of retaining Brown\u27s promise for racial equality while reinvigorating an electoral politics that would better represent many of the people Brown intended to benefit

Education for Citizenship

Commencement address given by Deborah Jones Merritt, Director of The John Glenn Institute For Public Service and Public Policy, to the Autumn 2004 graduating class of The Ohio State University, St. John Arena, Columbus, Ohio, December 12, 2004

Pedagogy, Progress, and Portfolios

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

The Job Gap, the Money Gap, and the Responsibility of Legal Educators

Today’s law school graduates face a grim prospect: more than half of them will not make a career practicing law. Some of those graduates will enjoy jobs in fields allied with law, but many will settle for work with little connection to the degree they earned. Many of the graduates who land lawyer jobs, meanwhile, will struggle with other limits: stagnant salaries, contingent work, and few promotions. Some number of graduates, the ones who win the legal employment lottery, will build satisfying, remunerative careers as lawyers; there is still good work to be done in law. But the percentage of graduates in the last category is declining, and there is no credible evidence that this market reality will change. Today’s graduates are also paying considerably more for their legal education than graduates did ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. During the last decade alone, law school tuition jumped 67.8 percent at private schools and 151.2 percent at public ones. Over the same ten years, consumer prices rose just 28.1 percent. Law school tuition, in other words, has risen 2.4 to 5.4 times as fast as inflation. At the same time, the median starting salary for law school graduates has declined. Data from two different sources confirm that today’s average graduate earns less, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than graduates did ten or twenty years ago. These trends generate two gaps. The first is between the number of students earning law degrees and the number of lawyering jobs available to them. The second is between the tuition that students pay and the early-career salaries they receive—if they are fortunate enough to find lawyering work. I explore these two shortfalls, the job gap and the money gap, in the first and second sections of this Essay. In the final section, I turn to an equally troubling lacuna: the failure of law schools to acknowledge the harms their graduates are suffering. This responsibility gap is one that we, as educators, have the power to bridge. As I explore the shortfall between our schools’ actions and our responsibilities, I offer several concrete steps to close that gap

Book Review: Freedom of Expression: A Critical Analysis. by Martin H. Redish; Nimmer on Freedom of Speech: A Treatise on the Theory of the First Amendment. by Melville B. Nimmer.

Book review: Freedom of Expression: A Critical Analysis. By Martin H. Redish. Charlottesville, Va.: The Michie Company. 1984. Pp. xi, 276 ; Nimmer on Freedom of Speech: A Treatise on the Theory of the First Amendment. By Melville B. Nimmer. New York: Matthew Bender. 1984. Pp. xv, 510. Reviewed by: Deborah Jones Merritt

Constitutional Fact and Theory: A Response to Chief Judge Posner

In his James Madison Lecture on Constitutional Law, Chief Judge Richard Posner chides both professors and judges for devoting too much attention to constitutional theory and too little time to empiricism. Although I agree with Judge Posner\u27s endorsement of empiricism, I dispute the roles he assigns empiricism and theory. Social science matters when interpreting the Constitution, but not in the way Posner posits. Facts cannot replace constitutional theories, nor can they mechanically resolve questions posed by theory. Instead, empirical knowledge is most useful in unmasking the theoretical assumptions that undergird constitutional law, in focusing those theories, and in contributing to a multidimensional view of society that informs the substance of constitutional law. In this correspondence, I will examine the flaws in Judge Posner\u27s attempt to substitute empiricism for constitutional theory. I will then explore three more constructive roles that empiricism can play in constitutional law