ABSTRACT
The decision in the Loving case shows the distance twentieth-century American courts had traveled. By the early twentieth century, miscegenation laws were so widespread that American formed a virtual road map to American legal conceptions of race. In contrast to historians of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States, historians of the nation in the mid- to late-twentieth century seem to focus on racial ideologies only when Americans are advanced by the far Right or by racialized groups themselves. Culturalists set these two seemingly contradictory depictions of race — the argument that biological race was nonsense and the argument that race was merely biology—right beside each other. Lawyers in miscegenation cases therefore neither needed nor received much courtroom assistance from experts. By the time the Kirby case was heard, lawyers and judges approached miscegenation cases with working assumptions built on decades of experience.
