In an article published at the end of 1959, Harvard Law School professor Herbert Wechsler described Brown as “an opinion which is often read with less fidelity by those who praise it than by those by whom it is condemned”—the most circumlocutory way imaginable of saying that it was wrongly decided. Wechsler showed in devastating detail that Brown would have been impossible under any faithful reading of what the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment had meant by equality. He also argued that the Brown justices had blundered when they focused on equality in the first place. The “heart of the
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