Time, Change, and the Constitution

Abstract

HE future is hard to predict and thus hard to control. A striking example of this principle in the context of Brown v. Board of Education involves one of the central participants in that case, Justice Stanley Reed. According to some accounts, a few years after Brown was decided Justice Reed had some health troubles and was advised by his doctors that his long-term outlook was not good. In response to that advice, and possibly in order to spend what little time remained to him as pleasantly as possible, he resigned from the Supreme Court in 1957 after nineteen years of service. T