McCormick’s ruling engaged with this testimony directly. His finding that segregation created a sense of inferiority in the children subjected to it was a legal conclusion drawn from social scientific evidence — an early example of what would become a contested but influential practice in civil rights litigation: using social science to establish constitutional harm.
Critics of this approach have argued, both at the time and subsequently, that legal conclusions should not be made to rest on social scientific findings that may be contested, revised, or overturned. The evidentiary basis for constitutional rights, this argument goes, should not fluctuate with the state of social science research. These are serious concerns, and they have been debated by legal scholars and social scientists since the Mendez period.
What is clear is that the approach worked in Mendez — that McCormick was persuaded by the testimony, that his ruling engaged with it, and that the approach carried forward. The specific contribution of the Mendez social science testimony to what the NAACP did in Brown is a question about intellectual lineage that cannot be resolved with certainty. But the Mendez case established that a federal court would receive such testimony and give it weight.
## The Naming of Schools
When a school is named after a person, it is a statement about what that community values and who it believes children should know about. The schools named after Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, and the school named after Sylvia Mendez in Berkeley, are institutional expressions of a judgment about the significance of what the family accomplished.