Gale Encyclopedia Of American Law 3Rd Edition Volume 2 P17 pot

Douglas Corporation secure contracts to build
aircraft in China. The liberal Committee for
Economic Organizing complained that he was
“promoting companies, not jobs.”
But scandals nearly sank Brown. In 1993,
during Brown’s first year as secretary of
commerce, a Vietnamese businessman alleged
that Brown had accepted a $700,000 bribe from
the government of Vietnam to remove a long-
standing trade
EMBARGO. Brown denied the
charge; the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
conducted a year-long probe, and he was
ultimately cleared. By late 1994 rumors spread
in the press that he would resign to run
Clinton’s reelection campaign. In February
1995, new allegations emerged. U.S. attorney
general
JANET RENO opened another criminal
probe into Brown’s personal finances. This
time, congressional Republicans accused him
of violating disclosure requirements and evad-
ing taxes. Brown again denied any violation of
law, but Republican critics began calling for his
dismissal—as well as the elimination of the
Department of Commerce itself, which they
called irrelevant and outdated. In May 1995
fourteen Repub lican senators told Attorney
General Reno that fairness required that the
probe be conducted outside of the Clinton
administration. Reno agreed; she requested the

appointment of an
INDEPENDENT COUNSEL to
examine Brown’s finances. Particularly trou-
bling was one odd-looking busines s deal: Brown
had earned nearly $500,000 from selling his
interest in a firm in which he had never
invested.
Brown won high regard for his work in the
law. He was the recipient of two American
Jurisprudence awards for outstanding achieve-
ment in jurisprudence and for outstanding
scholastic achievement in poverty law. He
served as a trustee of Middlebury College, and
as a board member of both the United Negro
College Fund and the University of the District
of Columbia. He was a fellow of the Institute of
Politics, at the
JOHN F. KENNEDY School of
Government, at Harvard University.
On April 3, 1996, Brown was killed in a
plane crash near the city of Dubrovnik, Croatia,
with thirty-two other
COMMERCE DEPARTMENT
officials and U.S. business executives. They
had planned to explore investment opportu-
nities for the reconstruction of Croatia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina.
FURTHER READINGS
Brown, Tracey L. 1998. The Life and Times of Ron Brown: A
Memoir. New York: Morrow.

Holmes, Steven A. 2000. Ron Brown: An Uncommon Life.
Indianapolis: Wiley.
Lynk, Myles V. “Ron Brown Remembered” 1996. The
Washington Lawyer 10 (May–June).
BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF
TOPEKA, KANSAS
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 47 S.
Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873, was the most significant
of a series of judicial decisions overturning
SEGREGATION laws—laws that separate whites and
blacks. Reversing its 1896 decision in
PLESSY V.
FERGUSON, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed.
256, which established the “separate-but-equal”
doctrine that found racial segregation to be
constitutional, the Court unanimously decided
in Brown that laws separating children by race in
different schools violated the
EQUAL PROTECTION
Clause of the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT,which
provides that “[n]o state shall deny to any
person the equal protection of the laws.” In
making its decision, the Court declared that
“separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal.” Moreover, the Court found that
segregated schools promote in African American
children a harmful and irreparable sense of
inferiority that damages not only their lives but
the welfare of U.S. society as a whole.
The principle expressed in Brown was used

in later decis ions of the Supreme Court and
lower federal courts to reverse segregation in
other fields as well. By the end of the 1960s, laws
that had required racial segregation in buses,
trains, bathrooms, and other public places had
been overturned, as had many other laws that
obstructed the rights of African Americans.
Brown thus served as a milestone in the struggle
of African Americans to gain equal
CIVIL RIGHTS
in U.S. society. It also symbolized the judicial
activism of the Supreme Court under Chief
Justice
EARL WARREN, who would go on to lead
the Court until 1969 in a remarkable era of
change with regard to civil rights.
Brown was actually the culmination of a
decades-long struggle by both African Amer-
icans and sympathetic whites against segrega-
tion and other discriminatory laws. Though it is
a given in the early 2000s that persons of all
races should enjoy equality under the law in the
United States, that has not been the case for
most of the country’s history. Even after the
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
148 BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS
Civil War had ended and the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Amendments had outlawed SLAVERY
and guaranteed the civil rights of “all persons
born or naturalized in the United States” (U.S.

Const. amend. XIV), southern states and
localities established the racially discriminatory
Jim Crow laws—also known as the Black
Codes—to keep African Americans from enjoy-
ing legal equality with whites.
The term Jim Crow derives from a popular
minstrel song of the nineteenth century. These
laws made it difficult or impossible for African
Americans to vote, made it illegal for them to use
the same public facilities as whites, restricted
their travel, forbade interracial
MARRIAGE,and
otherwise attempted to keep African Americans
in a state of dependence and inferiority with
regard to whites. Most of these laws were passed
after the
RECONSTRUCTION period following the
Civil War, when the
MILITARY OCCUPATION of the
South had ended and the radical wing of the
REPUBLICAN PARTY, which under President ABRAHAM
LINCOLN
had been instrumental in dismantling
slavery, had declined in power. By the mid-1870s
southern whites were again in political control of
their region, and many quickly sought to return
blacks to a position of legal inferiority through
passage of discriminatory laws.
In 1896 the legal standing of the
JIM CROW

LAWS
was strengthened when, in Plessy v.
Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld the
constitutionality of a Louisiana statute requiring
blacks and whites to occupy separate railway
cars. The law in question, according to the
Court, was not a violation of the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment as long as the facilities provided for each
race were
SEPARATE BUT EQUAL. Moreover, the
Court voiced its disagreement with attempts to
challenge segregation laws and with the ideas
critics of segregation used to support those
challenges. For example, in its opinion, the
Court considered it a “fallacy” that “the
enforced
SEPARATION of the two races stamps
the colored race with a badge of inferiority,”
and it scoffed at the notion that “social
prejudices may be overcome by legislation.”
Ironically, the Court reinforce d its decision to
uphold the legality of segregation on rail cars by
noting the existence of laws “requiring separate
schools for colored children.” The Plessy deci-
sion and its separate-but-equal doctrine were
later used to uphold segregation in public
schools and other public facilities.
African Americans and others who sympa-
thized with their cause were bitterly disappoint-

ed by the Plessy decision. Over a decade later, in
1909, some blacks and whites joined together
to form the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (
NAACP), which
would eventually coordinate a successful legal
challenge to the Plessy ruling. The NAACP
brought together people of all races in an effort
to improve the situation of people of color.
Although the NAACP achieved some victories
in the fight against Jim Crow laws in the first
two decades of its existence, it was not until
1935 that the organization began actively to
mount a campaign against segregation in
schools. It did so assisted by legal counsels
CHARLES HOUSTON and WILLIAM H. HASTIE, and a
young assistant,
THURGOOD MARSHALL, who would
go on to be a member of the Supreme Court
from 1967 to 1991.
By 1939 Marshall had become head of the
NAACP legal branch, the NAACP Legal Defense
Fund, and by the early 1950s he and his
organization had argued and secured significant
legal victories before the Supreme Court that
helped set the stage for Brown. In Sweatt v.
Painter, 339 U.S. 629, 70 S. Ct. 848, 94 L. Ed.
1114 (1950), the Court sided with the NAACP
Legal Defense Fund when it ruled that a
separate law school for blacks in Texas could

Three attorneys in
Brown v. Board of
Ed.: (l-r) George E.C.
Hayes, Thurgood
Marshall, and James
M. Nabrit, on May
17, 1954, the day the
Court issued its
ruling.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3
RD E DITION
BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS 149
not provide an education equal to that available
to whites at the more established University of
Texas Law School. And in another case brought
by Marshall’s organization, McLaurin v. Okla-
homa State Regents, 339 U.S. 637, 70 S. Ct. 851,
94 L. Ed. 1149 (1950), the Court ruled that
separate library and lecture hall seats for a single
black graduate student were a violation of the
Fourteenth Amendment. However, neither case
addressed the separate-but-equal doctrine of
Plessy.
In 1952 Marshall and the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund brought two more significant
cases to the Supreme Court: Bolling v. Sharpe,
347 U.S. 497, 74 S. Ct. 693, 98 L. Ed. 884
(1954), which dealt with racial segregation of
schools in the District of Columbia, and Brown,

which was actually a consolidation of four
CLASS
ACTION
suits (suits brought to court on behalf of
a group of peop le) from federal district courts
in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, and
Virginia. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund
brought the cases to court on behalf of African
American children who were refused admission
to schools attended by white children as a result
of laws allowing or requiring racial segregation
in schools. The
PLAINTIFF named in the case,
Oliver Brown, had a daughter, Linda Brown,
who had been denied admission to an all-white
elementary school in Topeka, Kansas, because
she was black. In all but the Delaware case, a
three-judge federal district court had decided
against the African American children and in
favor of the school districts, citing as precedent
the Plessy separate-but-equal doctrine. In the
Delaware case, the state supreme court also
upheld this doctrine but ordered that black
children be sent to superior white schools until
schools provided for blacks could be improved
to an equal condition.
Brown was argued before the Court in 1952
and reargued in 1953. Marshall, in making
his statement before the Court, argued that
the statutes in question in this case were

equivalent to the
BLACK CODES. He pointed out
the con tradictions in allowing blacks and
whites to vote in the same places and attend
the same
COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES,butnot
allowing black and white children to attend the
same elementary schools. He also maintained
that a decision in favor of segregation would
effectively be a decision to keep African
Americans as near as possible to their former
state of slavery. According to Marshall, such a
decision would be equivalent to saying that
“Negroes are inferior to all other human
beings.”
JOHN W. DAVIS, who was legal counsel for the
state of South Carolina, argued in his closing
remarks that the state had honored Plessy’s
separate-but-equal doctrine through large
investments in schools for black students. He
claimed that the state had the intention of
creating a condition of equality for children of
all races and that “the happiness, the progress
and the welfare of these children is best
promoted in segregated schools.” He also
maintained that it was not within the jurisdic-
tion of the U.S. Supreme Court to decide how
the state of South Carolina conducted its school
system. He told the Court:
Your Honors do not sit, and cannot sit as a

glorified Board of Education for the State of
South Carolina or any other state
Neither this Court nor any other court
can sit in the chairs of the legislature of
South Carolina and mold its educational
system, and if it is found to be in its present
form unacceptable, the State of South
Carolina must devise the alternative.
On the same day that the Court handed
down its decision in Brown, it decided the
related case of Bolling. Applying the same
principles that it had used in Brown, the Court
ruled in Bolling that racial segregation of
schoolchildren in the District of Columbia was
unconstitutional.
Spottswood Bolling
and his mother,
Sarah, read the
newspaper report of
the ruling in Bolling
v. Sharpe (1954),
which declared school
segregation in the
District of Columbia
unconstitutional.
BETTMANN/CORBIS.
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3
RD E DITION
150 BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS
In the following year, the Supreme Court on

reargument made another decision in Brown
that was designed to establish the methodology
by which to enforce desegregation of public
schools. Brown II, 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753,
99 L. Ed. 1083 (1955), as it has come to be
called, determined that school authorities had
the principal responsibility for evaluating and
solving local educational problems, including
those resulting from segregation. The Court
decided to remand (send back) the individual
cases in Brown to lower courts in order that
those courts might better assess the efforts of
school authorities to desegregate the public
schools and thereby provide to African Ameri-
can children their equal protection under the
laws as promised by the Fourteenth Amend-
ment. The lower courts were directed to take
into account any problems concerning school
administration, facilities, transportation, and
personnel, and to consider any revision of local
laws necessary to resolve the problems and
achieve desegregation.
Brown v. Board of Education dealt only
with government-mandated or government-
authorized segregation. It did not apply to racial
segregation or discrimination related to restau-
rants, theaters, employment, country clubs, or
other parts of the private sector. However,
Brown fostered changes in the legal and moral
outlook of the country that greatly aided future

efforts to end racial discrimination as related to
employment, housing, and places of public
accommodation, and thus greatly affected U.S.
race relations.
Despite the promise of Brown, desegregation
of U.S. schools proceeded slowly. In the years
immediately following the decision, many south-
ern school districts resisted or delayed imple-
mentation of its desegregation requirements,
thereby forcing the Supreme Court and other
lower courts to oversee and supervise school
administrative functions in many localities. As
time went on and southern schools became more
INTEGRATED, the Court shifted its focus to school
districts all over the country, particularly those in
cities. In the second half of the twentieth century,
many African Americans moved from rural to
urban areas, often in the northern states. School
districts in many of those urban areas became
separated into suburban white districts and
urban black districts. In response to this
challenge, courts imposed busing requirements
during the 1970s: in the interest of creating more
racially balanced schools, children were bused to
different schools that were sometimes far from
their home neighborhoods. In many cities,
busing became highly controversial.
By the late 1980s, legal battles surrounding
the legacy of the Brown decision changed when
some school districts began to request that they

be released from the court supervision of their
operations that had been required by Brown.
Accordingly, the Supreme Court began to focus
on the issue of when a court order to
desegregate a school district should be dissolved
and autonomy returned to the local school
officials and community. In Board of Education
v. Dowell, 498 U.S. 237, 111 S. Ct. 630, 112 L.
Ed. 2d 715 (1991), which dealt with a court-
imposed desegregation plan in Oklahoma City,
the Court ruled that a court-ordered desegrega-
tion decree may be dissolved when a school
district shows that it has taken all “practicable”
steps to end a state-imposed dual school system
and demonstrates that it is unlikely to revert to
its former ways. The ability to dissolve a court-
ordered desegregation plan, the Court’s opinion
stated, would enable a school district that had
attempted to achieve the goal of desegregation
to avoid “judicial tutelage for the indefinite
future.”
Justice Marshall, now near the end of his
career on the Court, dissented from the
majority opinion in Dowell. He argued that,
given the long history of segregation, it was too
early to leave the Oklahoma City school district
to its own devices. Though he agreed that
perpetual federal judicial supervision of local
schools had never been envisioned by the Court,
he feared that the Court’s decision in this case

would simply perpetuate an already unsatisfac-
tory standard of
INTEGRATION in the Oklahoma
City school district and in other school districts.
In another case, Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S.
467, 112 S. Ct. 1430, 118 L. Ed. 2d 108 (1992),
the Supreme Court held that district courts may
relinquish supervision and control of school
districts in incremental stages, before full
compliance has been achieved in every facet of
school operations. The Court also ruled that
once a school district corrects any racial
imbalance that violates the Equal Protection
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the
district has no obligation to remedy a later
imbalance caused by population shifts.
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS 151
As these cases indicate, the issue of desegrega-
tion of public schools remained a vital public issue
even several decades after the Supreme Court’s
decision in Brown. As a meansofboth training and
socialization, education is still a necessity for U.S.
society as a whole and for any individual in
particular, and it is expected to remain so in the
future. Guided by Brown, the U.S. judicial system
has decisively concluded that the constitutional
provision of equal protection under the laws
guarantees that children be entitled to an equal,
not a separate, public education.

FURTHER READINGS
Balkin, Jack M., et al, eds., 2001. What Brown v. Board of
Education Should Have Said: The Nation’s Top Legal
Experts Rewrite America’s Landmark Civil Rights Deci-
sion. New York: New York Univ. Press.
Hunt, James L. 2001. “Brown v. Board of Education after
Fifty Years: Context and Synopsis.” Mercer Law Review
52 (winter).
Oliver Brown and the NAACP
A
B
s the man whose name appeared in the title of
perhaps the most influential U.S. Supreme
Court decision ever, Brown v. Board of Education,
347U.S.483,74S.Ct.686,98L.Ed.873(1954),Oliver
Brown was an unlikely hero for the civil rights
movement. The African American welder, war
veteran, and assistant pastor was a quiet, upstand-
ing citizen of Topeka, Kansas, who had never been
known to publicly oppose discrimination against his
race. However, he took a decisive stand against
racial discrimination when he joined one dozen
other African American parents in f iling suit for the
right of their children to attend the elementary
schools of Tope ka alongside white child ren.
Brown’s participation in the lawsuit was encour-
aged by the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), which provided necessary
legal expertise and organization for the case. Long
familiar with the practice of school segregation in

Topeka and many other school districts, NAACP
lawyers approached Brown and other parents in the
summer of 1950 to see if they would join them in a case
that challenged that practice.
It was precisely Oliver Brown’s modest qual ities
that made the NAACP cho ose him as a plaintiff.
His reputation for integrity could help mute criticism
in a controversial case that stirred up angry
emotions in both the white and black commun ities
of Top eka. The city’swhitemajoritywaslargely
content to remain with a school system that
maintained eighteen all-white elementary schools
and four all-black elementary schools. African
Americans, meanwhile, feared the case would
cause the white community to attack what few civil
rights they already possessed. Others could not
become involved in such a controversy without
the fear of losing their jobs with white employers.
For that reason, very few African Americans in
Topeka actually belonged to the NAACP.
Like many other African American parents,
Brown was upset that his daughter had to travel a
long distance to an all-black school when an all-
white school was located much nearer their home.
He also could not help but notice that the all-white
schools were in better repair than the all-black
schools. Brown agreed to join in the NAACP’scase,
and in September 1950 he tried unsuccessfully to
register one of his three daughters, Linda Brown, i n
an all-white school only seven bloc ks from their

house. When the case first came to the U.S. District
Court for Kansas in June 1951, Brown testified that
his daughter had to travel twenty-one blocks to an
all-black school, part of the way through a
dangerous railroad switching yard.
In the end, African Americans did not seek to
end the s ystem of segregation in public schools
merely to have their children travel fewer miles to
class or sit in ni cer buildings. At stake were much
more important issues that affected their status in
U.S. society. As expressed by NAACP attorneys in
later testimony before the Supreme Court, African
Americans had come to see segregated schools as
inherently unequal. These schools relegated A frican
Americans t o an inferior class, instilled feelings of
insecurity, diminished their opportunities, and
retarded their mental development. The victory
eventually achieved in Brown wouldgoalong
way toward eliminating those harmful effects of
segregation and guaranteeing African Americans
their full c onstitutional rights.
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
152 BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS
Irons, Peter H. 2004. Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken
Promise of the Brown Decision. New York: Penguin.
Klein, Dora W. 2002. “Beyond Brown v. Board of
Education: The Need to Remedy the Achievement
Gap.” The Journal of Law and Education. 31 (October).
Kluger, Richard. 2004. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v.
Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for

Equality. New York: Vintage.
Levine, Ellen, ed. 2000. Freedom’s Children: Young Civil
Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories. New York:
Putnam Juvenile.
Patterson, James T. 2005. Brown v. Board of Education: A
Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy. New
York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Pollack, Jack. 1979. Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed
America. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
Weinberg, Meyer. 1967. Race and Place: A Legal History of
the Neighborhood School. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept.
of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Wells, Amy Stuart, and Lamar P. Miller, eds. 2005. Brown
Plus Thirty: Perspectives on Desegregation. New York:
Metropolitan Center for Educational Research, New
York Univ. Press.
Whitman, Mark, ed. 1993. Removing a Badge of Slavery: The
Record of Brown v. Board of Education. Princeton, NJ:
Marcus Wiener.
Wilkinson, J. Harvie III. 1979. From Brown to Bakke: The
Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978. New
York: Oxford Univ. Press.
CROSS REFERENCES
“Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas”
(Appendix, Primary Document); Civil Rights; Discrimina-
tion; Equal Protection; Jim Crow Laws; Marshall, Thur-
good; NAACP; Republican Party; School Desegregation;
Warren, Earl; Warren Court.
v
BROWN, WALTER FOLGER

Walter Folger Brown was born May 31, 1869, in
Massillon, Ohio. He received a bachelor of arts
degree from Harvard University in 1892 and
attended Harvard Law Sch ool from 1893 to
1894.
Brown practiced law from 1894 to 1927
and entered politics in 1921, serving for three
years as chairman of the Congressional Joint
Committee on Reorganization. In 1927 he
became assistant secretary of
COMMERCE, and
two years later performed the duties of U.S.
postmaster general, acting in this capacity until
1933.
Brown’s interests and activities in business
were numerous and included service as presi-
dent and chairman of the board of the Hudson
and Manhattan Railroad Company. Brown died
January 26, 1961, in Toledo, Ohio.
v
BROWNELL, HERBERT, JR.
Herbert Brownell Jr. was the 65th attorney
general of the United States. He served from
1953 to 1957 in the administration of President
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER. Brownell’s tenure as
attorney general was marked by his
ADVOCACY
of CIVIL RIGHTS, particularly concerning the
enforcement of the landmark case
BROWN V.

BOARD OF EDUCATION, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686,
98 L. Ed. 873 (1954) in which the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled in favor of desegregation of public
schools. Brownell also proposed landmark civil
rights legislation.
Brownell was born in Peru, Nebraska, on
February 20, 1904. In 1924, he graduated from
the University of Nebraska and then attended
Yale Law School. After receiving his law degree
in 1927, Brownell was admitted to the New
York State bar and worked for the noted law
firm of Root, Clark, Buckner, Howland &
Ballentine for two years. In 1929, he joined
the law firm of Lord, Day & Lord.
Brownell served as a member of the New York
State Assembly from 1933 to 1937, becoming an
advisor to
THOMAS E. DEWEY, a New York DISTRICT
ATTORNEY
who had successfully prosecuted
Walter Folger Brown 1869–1961
▼▼
▼▼
18501850
19001900
19251925
19501950
19751975
18751875
❖

◆◆
◆
◆❖
1861–65
U.S. Civil War
1869 Born,
Massillon, Ohio
1892
Received B.A.
from Harvard
University
1894
Began
practicing
law
1906–12 Served as
chairman of the Ohio
Republican Central
Committee
1914–18
World War I
1921 Appointed chair of the Congressional
Joint Committee on Reorganization
1927
Appointed
assistant
secretary of
commerce
1939–45
World War II

1933–46 Served as
president and chairman
of the board of the
Hudson and Manhattan
Railroad Company
1929–33 Served as U.S. postmaster general
1950–53
Korean War
1961 Died,
Toledo, Ohio
1961–73 Vietnam War
BROWNELL, HERBERT, JR. 153
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
organized-crime syndicates. Dewey had run for
governor in 1938 but lost to
INCUMBENT Herbert
Lehman. Dewey also made an unsuccessful bid for
the Republican presidential nomination in 1940.
Brownell urged Dewey to run again for governor
in 1942. With Brownell as his campaign manager
and chief political strategist, Dewey was elected
governor of New York.
With Brownell managing his campaign,
Dewey ran again for president in 1944, only to
lose to
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT. Having gained
national prominence, Brownell served as
chairman of the Republican National Commit-
tee from 1944 to 1946. He also functioned once
more as the presidential campaign manager for

Dewey, who h ad been re-elected governor in
1946. In 1948
HARRY TRUMAN narrowly defeated
Dewey.
In 1952 Brownell encouraged
WORLD WAR II
hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for
president. Brownell helped the general to secure
the Republican nomination and then worked
closely with him in his successful run for the
presidency. In 1953 a gratefu l Eisenhower
appointed Brownell as U.S. attorney general.
Brownell was an influential advisor to the
president and was involved in numerous contro-
versial situations. Shortly after his appointment as
attorney general, Brownell became involved in the
case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been
convicted of
ESPIONAGE and sentenced to death.
Supporters of the Rosenbergs, who had exhausted
all their appeals, petitioned the president to
commute their sentences to life
IMPRISONMENT.In
June 1953, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
WILLIAM O.
DOUGLAS granted the Rosenbergs a stay of execu-
tion in order to consider new evidence. Although
the U.S. Supreme Court was recessed for the
summer, Brownell convinced the justices to come
back and hear the matter. The Court, in a special

session on June 19, 1953, dissolved the stay, and
the Rosenbergs were executed that same day.
Brownell raised the ire of many Southerners
(as well as anti-integration forces throughout
the country) when he used the
JUSTICE DEPART-
MENT
to enforce the mandate of the Brown case
in desegregating public schools in the South.
The climax came when Arkansas Governor
Orville Faubus ordered the state’s
NATIONAL
GUARD
to bar black students who were seeking
admittance to a high school in Little Rock.
Eisenhower, at Brownell’s urging, federalized
the troops and used them to escort the students
to and from the school.
Herbert Brownell Jr.
CORBIS.
▼▼
▼▼
Herbert Brownell Jr. 1904–1996
19001900
19501950
19751975
20002000
19251925
❖
◆

❖
◆
◆
◆
◆
1904 Born,
Peru, Nebraska
1914–18
World War I
1927 Received LL.B.
from Yale Univ.;
admitted to N.Y. bar
1933–37 Served in
N.Y. State Assembly
1953–57 Served
as U.S. attorney
general
1957 Became U.S. member
of Permanent Court of
Arbitration at the Hague
1996 Died,
New York City
1964 Civil Rights
Act of 1964 passed
1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision held
racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional
1953 Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg executed
by U.S. government
for espionage

154 BROWNELL, HERBERT, JR.
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
Brownell, who had been a civil rights
supporter since his days in the New York State
legislature, drafted legislation that would give
the U.S. attorney general unprecedented power
to institute suits in the name of the United
States to enforce civil rights in many public
accommodations includin g housin g, parks,
theaters, restaurants, and hotels. The legislation,
called the Brownell Bill, also sought the power
to enforce injunctions to stop violations of civil
rights in the same areas. The bill went through
numerous permutations and ended up being
greatly weakened in its enforcement efforts.
Nevertheless, it w as passed as the Civil Rights
Act of 1957—the first civil rights legislation
passed in 82 years.
After leaving his post as attorney general in
1957, Brownell served as the United States’
member to the Permanent Court of
ARBITRATION
at the Hague. He remained associated with the
Lord law firm from 1977 to 1989. From 1985 to
1989 he served as a member of the U.S.
Bicentennial Commission for the U.S. Consti-
tution. In 1993 he published Advising Ike: The
Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell.
Brownell died in New York City on May 1,
1996.

FURTHER READINGS
Brownell, Herbert, with John P. Burke. 1993. Advising Ike:
The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell.
Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas.
Caro, Robert. 2003. Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon
Johnson. New York: Vintage.
Justice Department. 1985. Attorneys General of the United
States, 1789–1985. Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office. Available online at oj.
gov/ag/attygeneraldate.html; website home page: http://
www.usdoj.gov (accessed July 8, 2009).
v
BROWNING, JAMES ROBERT
James Robert Browning, a federal judge, is
credited with holding the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Ninth Circuit together at a time when
there was enormous pressure to split the
nation’s largest and busiest circuit into smaller,
more manageable units. Browning’s innova-
tions in
JUDICIAL ADMINISTRATION demonstrated
that the federal courts, despite ever-increasing
caseloads, could continue to provide speedy and
effective justice. During his tenure, the Ninth
CIRCUIT COURT, which oversees justice in nine
western states and two Pacific territories, grew
from a nine-judge panel to a 28-judge tribunal
that managed more than 5,500 appeals a year in
the late 1980s.
Browning was born in Great Falls, Montana,

on October 1, 1918. He grew up in and attended
the public schools of Belt, Montana, a small
town east of Great Falls, where his father was a
blacksmith and, later, owner of the town’s Ford
dealership. Browning completed his undergrad-
uate work at the University of Montana and
entered that university’s law school in 1938,
becoming editor in chief of the
LAW REVIEW and
graduating with honors in 1941. After gradua-
tion, he joined the Antitrust Division of the
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT in Washington, D.C. Two
years later, he was inducted as a private into the
U.S. Army Infantry. He served in military
intelligence in the Pacific theater for three years,
attaining the rank of first lieutenant and
winning a Bronze Star.
Following
WORLD WAR II, Browning returned
to the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division,
first in Washington, D.C., and then in Seattle,
Washington. In 1948, at the age of 30, he was
▼▼
▼▼
James Robert Browning 1918–
1905
1950
1975
2000
1925

❖
1961–73
Vietnam War
1950–53
Korean War
1939–45
World War II
1914–18
World War I
1918 Born,
Great Falls, Mont.
◆
◆
◆◆ ◆
◆◆◆◆ ◆◆
2000 Assumed senior
status as Ninth
Circuit Judge
1988 Stepped down
as chief judge, but
remained active
as circuit judge
1985 Administration of Justice in a
Large Appellate Court—The Ninth
Circuit Innovations Project published
1976 Named
chief judge of
the Ninth Circuit
1969–71 Served on U.S.
Judicial Conference’s

committee on
judicial administration
1961 Appointed
circuit judge to
the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit by
Pres. Kennedy
1958
Appointed
clerk of U.S.
Supreme
Court
1952 Appointed
executive assistant
to the U.S. attorney
general
1948 Appointed chief of the Northwest
Regional Office of the Antitrust Division
1943 Joined U.S. Army Infantry
1941 Joined U.S. Justice
Dept.’s Antitrust Division
2005 Ninth
Circuit
courthouse
named in
his honor
THE NINTH CIRCUIT
IS THE ONLY COURT
IN WHICH

, WITHIN
OUR BOUNDARIES
, IS
REPRESENTED ALL
THE POINTS OF VIEW
,
BASICALLY ALL THE
PROBLEMS
, SOCIAL
AND ECONOMIC
, OF
THE WHOLE NATION
.
T
HAT KIND OF COURT
CAN MAKE A VERY
POSITIVE CONTRIBU-
TION TO THE DEVEL-
OPMENT OF THE FED-
ERAL LAW AT THE
NATIONAL LEVEL
.
—JAMES BROWNING
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
BROWNING, JAMES ROBERT 155
named chief of the Northwest Regional Office
of the division. Before long he was called back
to Washington, D.C., and named assistant chief,
General
LITIGATION Section, Antitrust Division. By

1951, he had joined the Civil Division as
first assistant. In 1952, he was named executive
assistant to the attorney general of the United
States. Later that year, he organized the Execu-
tive Office of U.S. Attorneys and became its
first chief.
Browning left the Justice Department in
1953 to enter private practice. For the next five
years, he was a partner at Perlman, Lyons, and
Browning, in Washington, D.C. In 1958 he was
named clerk of the U.S. Supreme Court. From
this position, he was appointed as a circuit
judge to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit, by President
JOHN F. KENNEDY,on
September 18, 1961.
As a circuit judge, Browning became
involved with the
JUDICIAL CONFERENCE OF THE
UNITED STATES
and started exploring the field of
judicial administration. (The Judicial Confer-
ence is the principal machinery through which
the federal courts operate and is responsible for
establishing the standards and shaping the
policies that govern the federal judiciary.)
In the mid-1970s, there was no guarantee of
speedy disposition of litigation in the federal
courts. The courts of appeals, in particular,
faced widespread crises because the volume of

appeals far exceeded the capacity of the courts
to decide them. The Ninth Circuit court was no
exception, and, because of its enormous backlog
of cases, was the subject of much discussion
among scholars, Congress, and the judiciary.
Studies to examine the problems of the Ninth
Circuit usually presented one of two conclu-
sions: reduce the size of the circuit, or add more
judges to the court. There was strong opposition
to dividing the circuit, but there was equally
strong opinion that adding more judges would
make the circuit even more unmanageable.
Browning was named chief judge of the
Ninth Circuit on July 1, 1976, and found
himself in a position to experiment with his
ideas on judicial administration. As the new
chief judge, Browning was instrumental in
convincing Congress to give the judges of the
Ninth Circuit an opportunity to demonstrate
that a large circuit with a large court of appeals
could perform effectively.
Under Browning’s leadership, that challenge
was met w ith remarkable success. Foremost
among the innovations initiated by Browning
and his colleagues were new methods of case
processing and control, including the installa-
tion of the first completely computerized
docketing (scheduling) system in a federal
appellate court. Browning’s innovations were
later chronicled in a study published by the

FEDERAL JUDICIAL CENTER (Administration of Justice
in a Large
APPELLATE Court—The Ninth Circuit
Innovations Project [1985]). The court also
created an executive committee to facilitate
administrative decision making, assigned simi-
lar cases to the same three-judge panel, resolved
panel conflicts with a “mini”
EN BANC court of 11
judges (rather than with all 28 judges assigned
to the circuit), and created a
BANKRUPTCY panel
to hear bankruptcy appeals exclusively.
These modifications and more, from decen-
tralized staffing to fundamental changes in the
way the court deliberates, turned the Ninth
Circuit into a model for other courts aro und the
country. In addition to speeding upjustice,
Browning’s innovations also improved the
Ninth Circuit’s judicial record over time. In
1984, the Supreme Court reversed 27 of 28
decisions from the Ninth Circuit. By 1987 the
circuit’s reversal rate was down to 47 percent,
the third lowest in the country.
James R. Browning.
COURTESY OF U.S.
COURTS FOR THE NINTH
CIRCUIT
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
156 BROWNING, JAMES ROBERT

On June 15, 1988, after a dozen years as
chief judge, Browningsteppeddownbut
remained an active circuit judge handling a
full caseload. In September 2000, Browning
took senior status. He retained his
CHAMBERS in
San Francisco and continued to hear court
cases. As of 2009, Browning’s 48-year tenure
on the court was the second longest of any
federal judge in the United States, and the
longest of any judge in the
U.S. COURTS OF
APPEALS
.
Browning helped establish the Ninth Judi-
cial Circuit Historical Society in 1985, and in
1987, he became one of the founders and
current board members of the Western Re-
gional Justice Center, a
NONPROFIT group that
focuses on the improvement of the judic ial
system. In 1991, he was awarded the presti-
gious Edward J. Devitt Award for Distin-
guished Service to Justice, and in 2001, he
received the Montana State Bar Association’s
William J. Jameson award. Also in 2001, U.S.
Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) intro-
duced a bill calling for the Ninth Circuit
Court’s San Francisco headquarters to be
named after Judge

JAMES R. BROWNING.Thebill
passed, and in 2004, the courthouse was
renamed in his honor.
FURTHER READINGS
Hursh, Jack. 1995. “Tribute to Judge James R. Browning.”
Montana Law Review 56 (winter).
MacLean, Pamela A. 2001. “Judge has given half a lifetime to
improving courts; diplomat, leader has 40 years’
practice at shaping an expanding 9th Circuit. (James
R. Browning, 9th U.S. Court of Appeals judge).” The
Los Angeles Daily Journal 114 (September 27).
———. 1988 “Judge Browning’s Legacy: the Ninth Circuit’s
Chief Judge Is Leaving the Court More Efficient Than
He Found It.” California Lawyer 8 (June).
v
BROWNING, ORVILLE HICKMAN
Orville Hickman Browning was born February 10,
1806, in Harrison County, Kentucky. He was
educated at Augusta College and admitted to the
Kentucky bar in 1831. In that same year, he
relocated to Illinois and established his legal
practice.
In 1836 Browning served as a member of
the Illinois Senate, and in 1842 participated in
the Illinois General Assembly. He entered the
United States Senate in 1861, replacing
STEPHEN
A
. DOUGLAS as senator from Illinois, and
remained at this post until 1862. He gained a

reputation for his adversity to several policies
of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, including the EMANCIPATION
of slaves.
From 1866 to 1869 Browning served as U.S.
secretary of the interior and also acted as attorney
general for a short period in 1868. He attended
Orville Hickman
Browning.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
▼▼
▼▼
1825
Orville Hickman Browning 1806–1881
1800
1850
1875
1900
❖
❖
1806 Born,
Harrison County, Ky.
1881 Died, Quincy, Ill.
◆
◆
◆
◆
◆
◆
1831 Admitted to

Kentucky bar;
moved to Illinois
1836 Served as member of Illinois Senate
1842 Served as
member of Illinois
General Assembly
1861 Elected
to U.S. Senate
1861–65
U.S. Civil War
1866–69 Served as
secretary of interior
1869, 1870 Attended
Illinois Constitutional Convention
GALE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LAW, 3RD E DITION
BROWNING, ORVILLE HICKMAN 157