Recently I picked up as bedtime reading a book I hadn't looked at since the early 1960s. I'm referring to Bill Buckley's Up from Liberalism, which I bought second-hand in the original 1959 edition.
The book made a profound impression on me as a college undergraduate, and at the time I was converted to most of its arguments about big government and judicial overreach. Buckley warned against the expansion of centralized administration into our daily lives and was particularly upset by judges holding what he considered to be a political agenda. He castigated the Warren Court for how it decided the Brown v. Board of Education case. He questioned the court's ahistorical view of the Fourteenth Amendment, especially its use of the equal protection clause to cover an area of public life, namely school segregation, which its authors never intended to touch. According to Buckley, “We are seeing the ascendancy of ‘inherent meaning' over historical meaning, in matters of law, and with it, the moralization of politico-legal issues.”
Buckley also scolded a law professor from the University of Wisconsin who urged the federal government to take over the educational system of any state that closed public schools, in order to avoid integrating them. This represented for Buckley a form of “legal sophistry of a clearly totalitarian strain, bespeaking the intensity of ideological passion.”
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