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80 Va. L. Rev. 173 (1994)
The Significance of Brown v. Board of Education

handle is hein.journals/valr80 and id is 185 raw text is: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BROWN v. BOARD OF EDUCATION Mark Tushnet* A LL professions, I suppose, are liable to a general deformation in overestimating the significance of their activities.' Each may also be liable to different particular deformations. Historians, for example, who are attracted to stories of paradoxes, contradic- tions, and irony,'2 may find themselves slipping into an indefen- sible moral relativism and an inability to make confident moral judgments in connection with the histories they relate. Lawyers are notorious for producing law-office history, the result of the pro- fessional deformation in which judgment must be awarded to one or the other side. Law-office history reduces complexity and con- tradiction to simplicity and provides a story in which all evidence points to a single conclusion. Professor Klarman's article provides a useful corrective to the general professional deformation but, at least in its overall tenor, comes close to falling into the specific lawyer's professional defor- mation. He is surely correct that lawyers have overestimated the importance of Brown v. Board of Education in the transformation of race relations that occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century. I suspect, however, that Brown was more important than Professor Klarman makes it out to be. I believe that Professor *Associate Dean and Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. 1 Poets, I would think, take a fair amount of comfort in the thought that they are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and economists in the view that, according to John Maynard Keynes, The ideas of economists, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men.., are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money 383 (1935). 2 Leon F. Litwack, The Two-Edged Suspicion, Perspectives (American Historical Association Newsletter), Sept. 1993, at 13, 14. 3 I note that all but one of the citations Professor Klarman provides to support the proposition that Brown is commonly deemed to be one of the most important decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court, Michael J. Klarman, Brown, Racial Change, and the Civil Rights Movement, 80 Va. L. Rev. 7, 8 (1993), are to comments by lawyers, id. at 8 n.2. A minor quibble, of course, might be that Brown could well be one of the most important decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court, id. at 8

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