Plessy v. Ferguson

Questions for Further Study

• 1. Compare the majority opinions in Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sandford. Many claim that both were riddled with factual and logical errors. However, taking the facts as the authors of the majority opinions claimed them to be, were either, both, or neither consistent with the Constitution as it was then written?
• 2. Compare Plessy v. Ferguson with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Is the key distinction between them that the Brown Court took the harms of segregation seriously while the Plessy Court did not, or are there other distinctions that explain why the cases were decided so differently? How could each opinion have garnered such large majorities of the Court's justices? How could both cases be consistent with the Constitution?
• 3. Did Plessy v. Ferguson effectively gut the Reconstruction amendments in general or the Fourteenth Amendment in particular?
• 4. Should the legacy of Jim Crow laws be placed at Justice Brown's feet, as he was the writer of the Plessy v. Ferguson majority opinion?
• 5. What would a world governed by Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson have looked like twenty years after the case was decided?