"Thomas notes that the Supreme Court in Brown did not directly confront either Taney’s metaphor or the precedent of “Plessy”. Instead it spoke of racial segregation as having “generated” a sense of inferiority among black schoolchildren. The metaphor of generation allowed the Court to avoid ruling on the motive behind Jim Crow laws, just as it avoided ruling on the original intention of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thomas claims that the genius of “Brown” was that it used metaphor to adhere to precedent while, at the same time, altering the course of history. Opposing a static view of history, the “Brown” Court treated temporality as a component of reality. If reality changes, a truly historical approach requires that law update itself as well."
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https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Precedents
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