Law School Celebrates Marshall's Legacy

A group of Harvard Law School (HLS) professors who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall joined University President Lawrence H. Summers last night to discuss Marshall’s legacy on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

Summers spoke about the ruling’s impact on his own life, saying that desegregation was “the first public moral issue I encountered,” when, as a nine year old, his elementary school was integrated.

But Summers, who commended the ruling and Marshall’s work, called the legacy of Brown “a task that is unfinished.”

Summers and Professor of Law Scott Brewer also noted that empirical evidence on which the Brown decision was partly based—data that said continued segregation would hurt black students’ academic performance and self-esteem—might not be as relevant today.

Summers, an award-winning economist, discussed “the precariousness of resting Constitutional truth on the sands of social science.”

Brewer also talked of Brown as “in one sense, incomplete” because it was a decision that relied on empirical psychology, a field that has “changed since 50 years ago.”

Yesterday’s panel was the second of 10 events to be held by HLS this week and organized by Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree, to mark a half century of Brown’s consequences on jurisprudence and American life.

The panel included eight of the nine HLS professors who clerked for Marshall.

“More than one-eighth of the Harvard Law faculty has clerked for Justice Marshall, which must convey to everyone his out-sized importance,” Summers said.

Brewer, who clerked during Marshall’s last term on the Court, recalled

the civil rights legend’s “sober, but not sullen, attitude about the direction of the [Court’s] decisions” close to his retirement in 1991. Brewer said that even as Marshall, who died in 1993, found his influence increasingly diminished by the Court’s more conservative majority, he “remained resolute and passionate about the law to the end of his term.”

Summers, who acknowledged “knowing least about the subject” compared to the other panelists, nonetheless made an impassioned case for Marshall’s “moral vision.”

The panel spent much of its time discussing Marshall’s personality.

HLS Dean Elena Kagan recalled his sense of humor and how “he called me personally to offer me the [clerkship].”

Professor of Law Carol Steiker said that even as Marshall was, physically, the “biggest fat cat” on the Court, financially he was the “littlest fat cat.” Marshall’s relatively modest means, Steiker said, inspired her to become a public defender rather than make more money at a private law firm.

Professor of Law Randall Kennedy remembered when Marshall traveled to South Carolina to challenge the local Democratic Party’s attempt to exclude black voters from its primaries.

Kennedy said that “at a time when blacks were never called Mister...Thurgood Marshall was always Mister Marshall.”

HLS student-body president Holly A. Hogan said the event offered students a unique opportunity to reflect on an important case.

“[This] is a good example of the strong benefits of this law school, where we can see speakers that you can’t get anywher e else,” Hogan said..