This chapter uses examples from the United States to sketch these and other aspects of toweringness as a relational concept. It examines toweringness as a relation between one judge and his or her colleagues, using brief case studies from the New Deal era, which show judges as dependent upon the historical circumstances in which they find themselves, and a case study of the relation between William J Brennan and Earl Warren, showing an aspect of a court’s bureaucratic or institutional organization with a discussion of law clerks and opinion-drafting, and as subject to re-evaluation using Felix Frankfurter as an example.

This chapter tells the story of the long struggle to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and desegregate American schools - culminating with the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion Brown v. Board of Education. The chapter then examines the application of Brown, detailing how subsequent rulings purporting to stem from Brown have, in fact, failed to carry out its central command to desegregate all American schools. Much of this checkered legal history arose due to the Court’s insistence on delineating between de jure (legally mandated) and de facto (arising incidentally as a result of non-legally mandated conduct) segregation This distinction led to the 2007 PICS ruling, which dramatically circumscribes the use of race to achieve a desegregated educational environment for districts which experience de facto rather than de jure discrimination. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the growing “resegregation” of American schools, tracing its deleterious effects on all students.