Garrett Epps argues that the former impedes the latter:
Courts can’t conjure social change out of the air, like magicians with top hats. Courts don’t organize movements or conduct mass education campaigns. Those are the province of ordinary people. Courts can, however, succeed depressingly often in freezing the status quo and paralyzing legislatures, sometimes for decades.
After the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy, the ideal of an integrated society was crushed for more than 50 years. Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) thwarted a national movement to end child labor. Only after Darby, two decades later, was child labor banished from mines and factories. (If you doubt that it would have persisted otherwise, consider that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, upheld in Darby, exempts agricultural work from its child-labor provisions. Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that “hundreds of thousands of children under age 18 are working in agriculture in the United States.”)
Michael McCann offers an alternative view:
The Dish 