Abstract The Supreme Court is less constrained than political science has recognized. Motivated justices can dramatically alter politics without deferring to actors in the other branches. Subverting constraints, justices can aggrandize power and impose their irreducible preferences. Using Reconstruction as an example, this article brings new evidence to support the claim that an autonomous Court precipitated the end of Reconstruction. I make three essential arguments: First, the Republican commitment to federal civil rights protection extended longer than is traditionally supposed. Second, the architect of postbellum constitutionalism, Justice Bradley, harbored long-standing fear of Black equality and enfeebled the Reconstruction amendments when neither legal nor political imperatives compelled him to do so. Last, Bradley’s interventions substantially hindered Reconstruction by facilitating the “redemption” of southern state governments. This article employs mixed-methodology, using a difference-in-differences analysis and novel archival data. Contrary to scholarship arguing that the Court simply followed a Republican retreat, the Court dramatically reshaped the political-social development of Reconstruction.
Christopher Woods (Thu,) studied this question.