Social and social scientific perspectives in judicial interpretations of the constitution - A historical view and an overview

It has been traditional to demarcate Muller v. Oregon as the first Supreme Court case to benefit from a social science perspective and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka as the first case to rely on social science evidence. This article explores the hypothesis that social perspectives have long been a part of the Court's decisionmaking when it has confronted difficult social issues. Two 19th-century race opinions, Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson, are used to support this position. The authors suggest that the social perspectives contained in the other articles in this special issue reflect a long-standing association between social science information and law.