Intangible Factors: Social Capital, Social Networks, and America’s Second Reconstruction

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three studies of meaning-making in judicial opinions involving school desegregation in the United States over the past 60 years. In the first study, I examine rhetorical shifts across 82 Supreme Court rulings that consider school segregation. The discourse analysis shows that segregation’s meaning has been unstable and contested since Brown v Board of Education (1954), with five discrete meaning eras and vigorous internal contestation within each period. At different times, segregation has referred to the presence of a legal statute, the existence of demographic imbalance, and laws intending to perpetuate racial imbalance. Given the fluctuating meanings of segregation, the accompanying requirements of desegregation have accordingly shifted among eliminating official segregation laws, identifying and eradicating laws that intend to segregate, and widespread busing. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) famously held that that a set of “intangible considerations” prevented separate schools from ever being made equal. In the second study, I trace the meaning of “intangible” throughout the case law. First, drawing on publicly available legal documents, I built a new dataset called the SSCC (School Desegregation Court Cases) that comprises the full corpus of federal and state supreme court cases on school desegregation between 1930 and 2015 (N = 2,207). Second, utilizing a series of computational techniques, I built a terminological dictionary of words that were likely candidates to relate to or reflect the meaning of the judiciary’s “intangible” concept. I found that the dictionary terms tended to cluster into five concepts in the judges’ opinions: social capital or sociological factors, psychological factors, assimilation, diversity, and other intangible considerations. While these concepts were present in a substantial proportion of the case law, especially in the years before and after Brown, their appearance in judicial opinions has declined over time, suggesting that judges have become less interested in utilizing social scientific thinking and concepts to arrive at or support their rulings on school desegregation. While the second study documented a relatively high frequency of counts of appearances of sociological terms in court decisions involving school segregation, it did not explore how judges were using those terms. In the third study, I interpretively analyzed a subset (65) of school desegregation cases most saturated with these terms to understand what they meant to the judges authoring the opinions, what larger arguments or ideas they served, and towards what ends they were invoked. Of particular interest was the nature of intangibility (the term “intangible factors” that appeared in many of these cases). The interpretive analysis found that in a nontrivial portion of the case law, judges were “thinking like sociologists” and making sociological arguments about nonmaterial (intangible) dimensions to the nature of inequality that exists between groups. It also revealed that the sociological language was used to serve a variety of ideological ends and was relevant to case adjudication. Additional themes also emerged from the cases: school financing, the notion that segregation created a feeling of inferiority in Black children, and the idea that segregation prevented democratic inculcation. The findings provide insight into an important and under-explored part of the Brown story, show how thinking and beliefs shaped actions (i.e. judges’ rendering highly impactful decisions), and demonstrate the strengths and limitations of text analysis for socio-legal research rooted in case law.