If someone whom a Republican president had appointed to a high government position were to give a speech defending the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation under the heading of “separate but equal,” one would expect a political firestorm.  Yet when just such a speech was recently given, it was greeted with “feelings of relief and joy” by Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times and other liberals. What gives?

The speech in question was the Harvard Law School commencement address on May 27 of recently retired Justice David H. Souter. That it should take such a tolerant, not to say approving, view of the Supreme Court decision widely understood as the constitutional bedrock of Jim Crow is, indeed, appalling – and yet ultimately not surprising, given the mode of constitutional jurisprudence that the speech defends.