ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the issue of racial discrimination has contributed to the development of several areas of constitutional law. It draws on Lon Fuller's idea of the "bridging" case. Indeed, he develops his theory of the fortuity of "bridging cases" to account for its unpredictability and to explain how doctrinal chasms normally too wide to be crossed can nevertheless be spanned and thus take the law into unexpected new territory. The persons of the bridging case and their blackness—the distinctive set of circumstances, conditions, and personalities that constituted the bridge and made the doctrinal leap possible—are bleached out of the picture in favor of a more general and colorless principle, or more precisely, a principle that benefits mainly whites. In 1957, Colegrove, the white civic leaders of Tuskegee, a small Alabama town and home to the famous Tuskegee Institute, a Negro college founded by Booker T. Washington, requested that the Alabama state legislature alter the town's municipal boundaries.
