Article by Philip P. Frickey
In the preface to his definitive study of Southern politics in the era immediately following World War II, V.O. Key stated presciently that ‘[t]he South is our last frontier. In the development of its resources, human and natural, must be found the next great epoch of our national growth. That development, in turn, must in large measure depend on the contrivance of solutions to the region's political problems.’ His work concluded that ‘ t he race issue broadly defined . . . must be considered as the number one problem on the southern agenda. Lacking a solution for it, all else fails.’ Twenty-seven years later two other commentators hailed a transformation of Southern politics ‘accompanied by social and economic change more rapid than elsewhere in the country.’ Another five years later, one of these commentators returned to the theme of a New South ‘emerging from a relatively peaceful civil rights revolution’ fostered by the rulings of a ‘heroic band of judges' of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Of these judges, John Minor Wisdom was without doubt the ‘scholar,’ a judge who ‘elevated the craft of judicial opinionwriting to an art form.’ As two legal scholars have noted, ‘it may be said that Judge Wisdom created the ‘Wisdom opinion’: a characteristically long, detailed exposition of historical development and legal precedent, with particular attention to factual detail adding local color, all set in highly articulate prose.'
This article focuses on one cornerstone of the civil rights revolution to which Judge Wisdom contributed many important and scholarly opinions—the expansion of the franchise to Southern blacks and others shut out of the political process. Judge Wisdom's voting rights decisions deserve careful scrutiny for a variety of reasons. They are important in and of themselves, for they were crucial in opening the Southern political process to minorities and others. More generally, they provide case studies on putting democratic theory into practice, and they illustrate that the courts and Congress can work together in law reform. Some of his more recent decisions address issues at the heart of contemporary voting controversies. In the end, his voting rights decisions, when viewed as a whole, reveal a judicial artist who is at once both scholarly and pragmatic. The opinions are a microcosm of both the exhilarating possibilities of judicial review and of the difference between judicial scholarship and academic legal scholarship.
About the Author
Philip P. Frickey. Associate Professor of Law, University of Minnesota. The author served as one of Judge Wisdom's law clerks in 1978-79.
Citation
60 Tul. L. Rev. 276 (1985)