The involvement of the courts is recounted in vivid detail by Justin Driver, who sets out to rescue them from the purgatory to which critics across the political spectrum have consigned them. Conservatives charge that the courts have engaged in “judicial activism” for progressive change, while frustrated liberals indict them for failing to promote it. The leading figure in the latter movement is the law professor Derrick Bell, who insists that the judicial branch has not and cannot yield justice for African-Americans. Channeling his inner Rehnquist, perhaps, Bell has even suggested that the Supreme Court should have affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson in the Brown decision; that way, black students who continue to attend segregated schools might have a better chance of obtaining equal funds and services.

Most liberal critics of the Court don’t go that far. But they warn that we should never expect the judiciary to outpace legislatures and the broader public, which are the real engines of change in the United States. To Driver, the record is much more mixed than that: sometimes courts have lagged behind the rest of the country, but at other moments they have taken the lead. And they have helped expand the rights of American children, albeit unevenly and imperfectly. In a way, then, Driver aims to breathe new life into the old lawyer-driven narrative. Courts and attorneys might not be as crucial as earlier generations imagined in their paeans to Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston. But if you look at the long record of judicial intervention on matters of education, you see that the courts still matter for young Americans.

Read more at The New York Review of Books