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March 28, 2005
Civil procedure made fun (at least interesting)
Here are backstory documents to 14 "greatest hits" from a basic civil procedure class.
The section on Hansberry v. Lee caught my attention. This was Lorraine Hansberry's story: A Raisin in the Sun is based on her family's attempt to integrate a Chicago neighborhood in the face of a race-based restrictive covenant. But although her play is about much more than that, it would seem that the court case is about much less. The Hansberrys won "on a technicality" as it were: they were allowed to show that the covenant was invalid because the requisite 95 percent of the affected property owners had not signed the document. More precisely, they were allowed to raise this issue even though a lower court had found as a fact, erroneously, in a case that didn't involve them, that the 95 percent requirement had been met. A victory! but hardly a discussion of the merits, or not, of race-based restrictive covenants.
In the course I'll be teaching this fall on the law and rhetoric of the civil rights movement, I'm going to teach A Raisin in the Sun. My idea had been that I would teach it alongside a later case on racial restrictive covenants, Shelley v. Kraemer, because that case goes a little farther toward addressing the real issue head-on (though not really very far; and by giving the definition of "state action" such an amazing stretch that it could apply to almost any contract action, it created problems enough for whole generations of legal scholars). That is, my thought was that Hansberry v. Lee was so technical, so far removed from the real subject that it was about, that there wouldn't be much to gain by teaching it--at least where the purpose of the teaching is to talk about the various ways in which literary narratives and adjudicatory narratives address common issues of civil rights.
But this treasure trove of source documents is causing me to reconsider.
Posted by Eric at March 28, 2005 9:01 AM
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Comments
Where's International Shoe?
Posted by: elvez at March 28, 2005 12:34 PM
Maybe they could only make minimum contacts with the documents?
Posted by: Sally at March 28, 2005 2:00 PM
Adding to the lists of famous legal footware, we have the English defamation case of Winyard v. Tatler, where it was found defamatory to refer to some as "The International Boot"
(Nexis).
I'm about to hit Lexis. If I find an "International Sandals", I'm going to be very very scared
Posted by: Simon Spero at March 29, 2005 7:35 PM
If nothing else, might be worth pointing out that Hansberry v. Lee stands in a similar relation to the more sweeping Kraemer decision as, say, Gaines v. Missouri stands to Brown. At least that's how I (a non-lawyer teaching US history) usually frame it for my students; all those early anti-segregation cases are really fascinating, I think, precisely because they were often won (or even argued) on technicalities....
I can't speak to the usefulness of the documents, but Raisin would be a great book to use in a Law and Literature class...
Posted by: David Noon at March 29, 2005 10:43 PM
That's a good point. About Hansberry, what the briefs etc. show is that the arguments that were made were much more about race and the purpose of the 14th Amendment and all of that than you would ever guess from the Sup. Ct. opinion. Even the "state action" argument (the one that carried the day finally in Shelley v. Kraemer) was made. Not surprisingly, the court hung its ruling on a very narrow reed. So it turns out to be a great teaching case, because we can talk about the court's strategies in avoiding the real issue.
Posted by: Sally at March 30, 2005 8:22 AM