Brown v. Board of Education: The Justices’ Internal Deliberations

In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. Professor Michael J. Klarman, the Charles Warren Professor of Legal History at Harvard Law School, will discuss the impact of this momentous ruling. He’ll take us behind the scenes to examine the justices’ deliberations and reconstruct why they found the case so difficult to decide.

Professor Klarman joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 2008. He received his B.A. and M.A. (political theory) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1983, and his D. Phil. in legal history from the University of Oxford (1988), where he was a Marshall Scholar.