米国最高裁判決と「人種」―奴隷制廃止と市民権・学校統合と住宅隔離・投票権をめぐる攻防

抄録

The Constitution of the United States of America is the oldest among the ones in the modern ages as has been continuously inured to the present. One of the characteristics of the American political culture is the principle of “the rule of law,” which is thought to be the synonymy of democracy. Among others, the U.S. Supreme Court, as the ultimate referee of the meaning of the constitution and the last defender of the equal protection under the law, has changed its interpretations of the constitution. The U.S. Constitution itself has also changed its essential meanings by adding amendments, whose total number is twenty-seven so far. Especially, the Supreme Court’s decisions and the constitutional amendments concerning the “race” have dramatically influenced the American society in general. In this article, focuses are particularly put on the decisions on the following three fields, that is, slavery and the civil rights, school and residential integration, and the voting rights. The author is interested in, for instance, the following questions. Why and how could the original republic, successful in being independent based on the universal natural rights, justified the continuous existence of hereditary slavery strictly based on the “one-drop rule”? Why did the Jim Crow, the legalized segregation based on “race” authorized by the local laws in the South, was recognized by the Supreme Court after the establishment of the 14th and 15th Amendments? Why and on what logics did the Supreme Court justices apparently change their original mind of the Brown decision and was they determined to lead the American society back to the days of Jim Crow?

Chapter 1 deals with the relationship between the Supreme Court and the slavery and its aftermath. Focuses are put on the following three decisions: Dred Scott and Sandford(1857), which resulted in the Civil War and three constitutional amendments; the Civil Rights cases(1883), which declared the fatal limitation to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; and Pressey v. Ferguson(1896), which gave the national sanction to Jim Crow in the South.

Chapter 2 deals with the Supreme Court decisions concerning the integration of the school and the residence, one of the most controversial issues since the epoch-making Brown was delivered by all the nine justices unanimously in 1954. The case mainly picked up in this section is Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education which declared “integration now” in 1969.

Chapter 3 deals with the Supreme Court decisions in the field of the voting rights. Although the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the two positive results of the Civil Rights Movement led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought about a tremendous change to the politics not only in the South but also in the American society in general, the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 narrow margin, undermined it by Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Shelby decision has been the target of severe criticisms by a lot of lawyers and law school professors who have long been engaged in the civil rights issues. Obviously, it was the first example among the Supreme Court decisions that leads to the nation backward with regards to the civil rights. Shelby has no doubt helped the birth of the Trump administration and deepened the conspicuous political cleavage of the present-day American Society.

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