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This book examines demographics in legal and professional careers, offering insights and strategies for creating more diverse and inclusive workplaces.

This article explores the contradictions of criminal justice reform efforts in the United States, suggesting that the political and economic interests that support the current criminal justice system make it difficult to achieve more transformative reforms.

This edition of Researching Law details a World Bank panel on the effectiveness of anti-money laundering measures, which featured ABF’s Terence Halliday.

This article documents the prevalence in organized interest politics in the United States of organizations that have no members in the ordinary sense and analyzes the consequences of that dominance for the democratic representation of citizen interests.

This book presents a comparative theory on judicial reputation, exploring how judges shape their reputation and the role it plays in their careers.

In this article, Shapiro explores efforts to compensate health professionals for advanced care planning amidst contemporaneous changes to Medicare and Medicaid beginning in 2016.

This article, featuring Reuben J. Miller, examines the institutional and policy arrangements of prisoner reentry.

This edition of Researching Law features the address given by James Heckman at the White House Summit on Early Education.

Drawing on over 20 years of research, extensive surveys and interviews, the authors of this book explore the impact the tort reform movement in Texas has had on the ability of plaintiffs to obtain judgments–in short on private citizens’ meaningful access to the full power of the law.

Susan Shapiro examines the effectiveness of advance directives in directing end-of-life care, exploring the limitations of these legal documents in this article.

Christopher Schmidt explores the historical and conceptual divide between civil rights and civil liberties in the U.S., highlighting their different origins, strategies, and goals.

This article explores the role of the courts in the civil rights movement, focusing on the sit-ins and their impact on American law and society.

  • Articles

Divided by Law: The Sit-Ins and the Role of the Courts in the Civil Rights Movement

Christopher W. Schmidt
Making and Implementing Law, United States
May 2015

From the Law and History Review:

The lunch counter sit-in movement of 1960 was a contest not only over nondiscriminatory access to public accommodations, but also over the role of the courts in the developing civil rights movement. The students who launched the sit-ins explicitly defined their protest as an alternative to litigation-based reform tactics. Leading civil rights lawyers, in contrast, urged the students to rely on the judicial process. White business owners and local officials also divided over whether criminal prosecution of the protesters would best serve their interests. These divergent attitudes toward the courts derived from differences of strategy and ideology. They were also affected by developments in Fourteenth Amendment doctrine: by 1960, whether the non-discrimination principle of Brown v. Board of Education reached (or would soon reach) privately owned public accommodations was an open question. Conflict over the appropriate role of the courts ultimately worked to the students’ advantage. It contributed to their collective identity as a protest movement, helped secure outside support, and divided their opponents. Attention to the expectations diverse people placed upon the courts offers a vehicle for charting the ways law and perceptions of law shaped the sit-in movement at various levels — in the streets as well as the courts, among laypeople as well as lawyers and judges. This approach suggests new insights into the intersection of formal legal change and social movement mobilization.

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  • Books
The Sit-Ins: Protest and Legal Change in the Civil Rights Era
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