My thoughts on Brown are this. I know there is the "failed promise" literature (I'm reading Derrick Bell's "Silent Covenants" and another book called "The Unfinished Agenda of Brown v. Board of Education"). But I don't really know of people saying we would be better off now without Brown. Do people make that argument? Better off?

I know there are the Hollow Hope type arguments, that Brown didn't accomplish much and may have slowed down the push for equalization in schools for a while until it was enforced. But is there a case NOW to be made to overrule it?

One more issue. Suppose instead of Brown the Supreme Court had written "a decision based on a more thorough knowledge of race and its societal role" (Bell). Example - the decision should have recognized that white Americans were hurt by segregation, not just blacks. Would that be a plan or a counterplan? Seems like that wouldn't be an overrule to me. I just don't see the aff ground yet.
 

Brown v. Board of Education is all but dead. The Court has abandoned all pretenses of enforcing desegregation orders, and school districts across the country are resegregating. Busing programs have been abandoned, majority minority schools have been (re)created, and all of this has been accomplished without overturning Brown.

I don't think most people realize how rare an actual overturning of past precedent occurs. For example, y'all do realize that Brown v. Board of Education did not actually overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, right? Plessy is still technically "good law," except insofar as it is contradicted by the ruling in Brown. Not the same as being overturned. Similarly, the Court will allow the resegregation of society along racial lines, and is in fact doing just that right now, but they will do so without touching Brown. In spite of its practical irrelevance, the Brown decision still holds some symbolic value, as evidenced by Dr. Warner's citation of the numerous homages & tributes that marked the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary a few years back. Still, for all that, the decision is largely moribund.

America's educational system is more segregated now than at any time during the past half century. Ironically, schools in the South are slightly more likely to be desegregated than those in the North, but even this is starting to change. In the wake of Milliken v. Bradley, Missouri v. Jenkins, Board of Ed. OKC v. Dowell, etc., the educational desegregation project has come to a close. I'm not sure if this helps or hurts Dr. Warner's suggestion that overturning Brown be considered by the topic committee, but it's a fact that needs to be considered.

As far as affirmative action goes, and I haven't followed the discussion on eDebate at all, so my apologies if this is redundant, but overturning any of the recent SC decisions regarding affirmative action would create a bidirectional topic. The majority opinions in each of these cases recognized the possibility of an affirmative action program that passed strict scrutiny, but invalidated each specific instance under consideration as not sufficiently narrowly tailored to pass muster. So, overturning Grutter or Gratz could entail abandoning the strict scrutiny test (no more strict scrutiny for "reverse" discrimination), thus allowing broad-based affirmative action, or rejecting the idea that any program could pass such a test, thus eliminating any race-based affirmative action. Again, apologies if this is redundant, but I have no intention of reading through all the aff action posts just to see if this point has already been made.
 

Most of these criticism just dictate direction of a topic. The nature of a race-related resolution needs to call for a liberal action to combat the roll back of deseg and aff axn. Instead of overturn, we might consider a direction towards the outcome: increasing racial integration in one or more areas; increasing race-based initiatives. That may work with a mechanism of establishing a new precedent. Instead of overturning a decision, can a affirmative establish a landmark precedent in some areas.

All of this on Brown just means the topic goes the other way. Resolved: That the Supreme Court should re-establish Brown vs. Board of Education as the precedent for racial desegregation in education. OR overturn one of the cases that has eviscerated Brown like Miliken.

As far as the multidirectionality of Aff Axn cases, seems like wordings could mandate affirmative action in education.

An area topic that might accomplish all of this:

Resolved: That the Supreme Court estalish a new landmark precedent for increasing racial integregation through affirmative action or desegregation.
 

I'm not a big fan of the "areas" approach, because I don't think they provide much limit.

But one area that might make sense to include as an area is "school desegregation".

Here's why. There really doesn't seem to be one over-arching anti-Brown decision. Milliken, Rodriguez, Pitts and Jenkins are all important, but partial.

If we can find ways to provide meaningful limitation for an areas approach this would be a good one.
 

i'm about to post a rather lengthy response to ede's 'landmark' post, but i wanted to first say that i think that including brown v. board could be good – it really would make for interesting debates with a literature base entirely different than the other proposed areas, but still a limited enough area (school segregation) that it could be manageable.