Which was decided first, Katzenbach v. Morgan or Brown v. Board of Education?
Brown v. Board of Education Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) , was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the "Plessy v. Ferguson" decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, "de jure" racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the Civil Rights Movement, and a model for many future impact litigation cases. However, the decision's fourteen pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in "Brown II", 349 U.S. 294 (1955) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed".
United States v. Lopez United States v. Alfonso D. Lopez, Jr., 514 U.S. 549 (1995) was the second United States Supreme Court case since the New Deal to set limits to Congress' power under the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court held that the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, which banned possession of handguns near schools, was unconstitutional because it did not have a substantial impact on interstate commerce. After the "Lopez" decision, the act was amended to specifically only apply to guns that had been moved via interstate commerce.