Brown v. Board of Education: How the Decision-Making Process Influenced the Ruling

By Taylor Farrier 

Taylor Farrier, a current third-year student at Albany Law School, grew up in Queensbury, NY. Prior to attending Albany Law, she earned her bachelor’s degree from the University at Albany in 2019, where she majored in Political Science and minored in Criminal Justice.

At Albany Law, Taylor is a member of the Phi Alpha Delta Law Fraternity and the Business Law Society. She interned with the Warren County District Attorney’s Office in the summer of 2021 and for the Honorable Kathleen B. Hogan for the New York Court of Claims in the summer of 2020. She wrote this paper for Professor Bonventre's Supreme Court Seminar.

There is no denying that Brown v. Board of Education is one of the most monumental cases in all of American judicial history. Overturning Plessy v. Ferguson was a long and hard-fought battle during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the Civil War, the equality that black individuals in the United States had long fought for didn’t arrive as seamlessly as many may have hoped. Even following the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the country still had a long way to go in the process of constitutional equality between blacks and whites. 

While Brown v. Board of Education was undoubtedly a significant case, the unanimous decision of the justices doesn’t tell the whole story. Looking into the judicial philosophies of the justices on the Court during Brown, we get a deeper insight into how they were able to come to a unanimous decision. They did this despite differing ideologies and views, and how the judicial decision-making process influenced the outcome of the case. 

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To read the paper, open HERE.