Politics and the judiciary 213any sense, economic activity’. Thus boundaries were set against the ability of
Congress to legislate on social issues that it wished.
Other federal constitutional powers have been broadly interpreted by
the Court. The power of Congress ‘to lay and collect taxes... to pay the
debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United
States’ is the basis for the social welfare and security programmes of the fed-
eral government, which are both extensive and expensive. The Fourteenth
Amendment, ratified in 1868, provides that ‘no State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the
United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or prop-
erty, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction
the equal protection of the laws.’ On the basis of this Amendment the Court
has moved into the whole sphere of civil rights, outlawing racial segregation
in the schools and other public facilities, regulating state police and court
proceedings, and attempting to assure political equality to the citizens of the
United States. In these, and in many other areas, the Court has to give an
authoritative interpretation of the Constitution, albeit one that may change
from time to time. Let us look at the Court’s functions in the American po-
litical system by reviewing four important cases through which the Court
influenced policy-making in the period after the Second World War.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954
The Fourteenth Amendment was incorporated into the Constitution after the
Civil War in order to ensure that the newly freed slaves would be recognised
as American citizens and accorded their proper rights by the governments of
the states. As we have seen, the Amendment provided, among other things,
that no state might ‘deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal pro-
tection of the laws’. However, this broad instruction could be interpreted in
differing ways. The Southern states in particular wrote into their statute
books laws that provided for segregation of the white and black races in the
schools, on public transport, and in other areas of social life. Did such laws
conflict with the Amendment? In 1896 the Supreme Court considered this
problem in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The state legislature of Louisiana had
required all railroads to provide ‘equal but separate’ accommodation for the
two races. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Louisiana
statute, arguing that, although the Fourteenth Amendment had ensured the
political equality of the black and white races, it was impossible to ignore the
social inequality of blacks and whites, and concluded that it could not say that
‘a law which authorises or even requires the separation of the two races in
public conveyances is unreasonable.’ Although the Court was dealing in this
case with public transport, it made reference in the decision to segregation in
education, and over the following half-century Plessy v. Ferguson was the consti-
tutional basis for all kinds of state-enforced racial segregation. Provided that