The civil rights era was a time of pervasive change in American
political and social life. Among the decisive forces driving change were
lawyers, who wielded the power of law to resolve competing concepts of
order and equality and, in the end, to hold out the promise of a new and
better nation.
The Search for Justice is a look the role of the lawyers throughout
the period, focusing on one of the central issues of the time: school
segregation. The most notable participants to address this issue were
the public interest lawyers of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, whose
counselors brought lawsuits and carried out appeals in state and federal
courts over the course of twenty years. But also playing a part in the
story were members of the bar who defended Jim Crow laws explicitly or
implicitly and, in some cases, also served in state or federal
government; lawyers who sat on state and federal benches and heard civil
rights cases; and, finally, law professors who analyzed the reasoning of
the courts in classrooms and public forums removed from the fray. With
rich, copiously researched detail, Hoffer takes readers through the
interactions of these groups, setting their activities not only in the
context of the civil rights movement but also of their full political
and legal legacies, including the growth of corporate private legal
practice after World War II and the expansion of the role of law
professors in public discourse, particularly with the New Deal. Seeing
the civil rights era through the lens of law enables us to understand
for the first time the many ways in which lawyers affected the course
and outcome of the movement.
