Kalven implicitly accepts, lock, stock, and barrel, an argument that back then was usually put forward by Southerners: that much civil rights litigation amounted to barratry, a gaming of the justice system through the creation of stylized cases. Such scruples were clearly on the way out. Today, the “staging” of court cases is such a standard strategy for activist litigators that even many lawyers are unaware that until the 1950s it was widely considered a straightforward species of judicial corruption, and not just in the South.
