Plessy v. Ferguson is best known for giving the United States the “separate but equal” doctrine that upheld segregationist laws in the pre–civil rights era. Justice Henry Billings Brown’s majority opinion gained the assent of seven of the eight justices on the court, but it ranks close to that of Roger Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) as one of the most influential and thoroughly repudiated decisions the Supreme Court has ever adopted. Brown’s opinion provided a legal imprimatur to segregation and the Jim Crow system of laws that flourished from the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth century.