Brown v. Board of Education, Document G: “Crowded Segregated Classroom,” ca. 1940s Do you use document-based questions in your classroom? This winter the Bill of Rights Institute is blogging a document-based question on the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Each weekly post will feature an excerpted document related to the case, along with Read more…

Brown v. Board of Education, Document F: “African American Schoolgirls in Classroom, Learning to Sew,” (1899) Do you use document-based questions in your classroom? This fall the Bill of Rights Institute is blogging several document-based questions on the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Each weekly post will feature an excerpted document related to Read more…

Bill of Rights in the News: Searching for the Fourth Amendment The steady march of science and technology has a way of bringing settled law into new areas, challenging what was once convention. An upcoming court case involves just such a predicament – whether or not the government can search your laptop or cell phone Read more…

Brown v. Board of Education, Document E: “Washington, D.C. Public Schools, 1st Div-Class Making Geometric Forms with Paper,” (1899) Do you use document-based questions in your classroom? This fall the Bill of Rights Institute is blogging a document-based question on the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Each weekly post will feature an excerpted Read more…

Brown v. Board of Education, Document D: Dissenting Opinion, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Do you use document-based questions in your classroom? This fall the Bill of Rights Institute is blogging a document-based question on the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Each weekly post will feature an excerpted document related to the case, along Read more…

Are They Watching You? eLesson The Constitutional principle of due process, which holds that government must interact with citizens according to duly‑enacted laws, balances the rights of suspects with public safety. The Fourth Amendment was added to the Constitution to ensure we would be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. But do all searches require Read more…

Brown v. Board of Education: Document C, Majority Opinion, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Do you use document-based questions in your classroom? This fall the Bill of Rights Institute is blogging a document-based question on the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Each weekly post will feature an excerpted document related to the case, along Read more…

Bill of Rights in the News: Voters Make History with State Ballot Initiatives We’ll forgive you if you thought the recent election was only about the president. While the media focus was almost exclusively on the presidential race and national politics, there was a lot going on at the state level. These “laboratories of democracy” Read more…

Brown v. Board of Education: Document B, Section of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) Do you use document-based questions in your classroom? This fall the Bill of Rights Institute is blogging a document-based question on the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Each weekly post will feature an excerpted document related to the case, along Read more…

Fire in a Crowded Theater – The Origins of a Limit on Free Speech In discussions of the First Amendment and the limits of free speech, it is common to hear references to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous quote from Schenck v. U.S. 1919 – “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect Read more…