On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its unanimous decision in the _School Segregation Cases_. By general agreement, this decision is regarded as the court’s most momentous opinion of this century; indeed, only the court’s opinion of 1856 in the _Dred Scott_ case is thought to have had greater impact upon the American people or upon the course of historic events. Because of its destructive effect upon the stability of law and the permanence of long-established institutions, the school decision, in my own view, surpassed _Scott_ v. _Sanford_ in the area of jurisprudence gone mad. In one stroke, the Warren court violated those precepts of judicial restraint and constitutional interpretation which it most frequently has insisted on in the past; it transformed itself into a super-legislature--more, it usurped the functions of constitutional amendment that lie with not fewer than three-fourths of the States. Abandoning law, the court wedded sociology; discarding eighty years of unbroken precedent, members of the court substituted their own notions of psychology and moral fitness for the plain and palpable meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment in terms of racially separate public schools. And having prohibited unto the States the exercise of a power the States had been exercising with judicial approval since 1868, the court capped its day’s work by decreeing an end to segregation in schools of the District of Columbia. This latter stroke was achieved by judicial _coup de main_ that left even the court’s best friends embarrassed; what happened, Ralph Catterall has remarked, is that the court declared “unthinkable” that which had been universally thought for 166 years. This is the indictment the South brings against the Warren court for _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_ and the subsequent judicial progeny of that May afternoon. In one sense, it doubtless is futile to reargue _Brown_; as the court defiantly indicated by its unprecedented action in signing every judge’s name in 1958 to _Cooper_ v. _Aaron_, the principles it boldly put forward in 1954 are not to be reconsidered so long as the court’s present members may live. But it is important, nonetheless, that the South’s protest be understood and regularly renewed, lest it be supposed that with the passage of time the court’s action has been condoned and forgiven.