Ten years ago I wrote an introductory essay to the Institute of Judicial Administration’s first volume of case histories of school desegregation cases,Limits of Justice: The Courts’ Role in School Desegregation. In that essay, I expressed concern about the desirability, in the long run, of the active and essentially solitary role of the federal courts in shouldering the burden of school desegregation. While I identified areas in which courts could improve the judicial process in school desegregation cases, I also stated:

None of these changes could alter the essential character of the role of courts in school desegregation litigation....

The dramatic assertion in recent years of a right to equal opportunity by the disabled had its origin inBrown v. Board of Education,¹ the landmark race desegregation case. Although anti-discrimination concepts regarding the handicapped emerged from race discrimination precedents, the problems of the disadvantaged are, in fact, qualitatively different. As one judge aptly put it, “[A]ttempting to fit the problem of discrimination against the handicapped into the model remedy for race discrimination is akin to fitting a square peg into a round hole.”²

Legal doctrines dealing with problems of discrimination against the disabled need to be reconsidered to take...

When the complaint inAllen v. McDonoughwas filed in 1976, the city of Boston was in the throes of the implementation phase ofMorgan v. Hennigan,¹ one of the most confrontational school desegregation cases in modern American history. Two years before, U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity had ruled that the Boston School Committee had intentionally carried out a systematic program of school segregation. Accordingly, beginning with the 1974–1975 school year, Boston’s schools were subject to desegregation orders involving mandatory busing, which met open resistance from school committee members and parents and resulted in ongoing racial violence, arrests,...

The broad debate over the court’s role in education litigation conjures up bold images of federal judges taking over the management of large urban school systems through seemingly endless decrees. Using the mechanism of injunctive relief, judges have defined local instructional methods, education goals, and budgetary priorities in order to achieve social reform through structural reform. That is the way the American public views the judicial activism of recent years, for the drama of institutional takeovers is newsworthy, politically provocative, and intellectually debatable.

We find no such broadscale litigation aimed at reforming local education institutions to promote the rights of...

Denver was the first non-southern city to undergo extensive litigation over the desegregation of its schools. In this context it has become a mirror for the way America deals with its most pressing social problem: the integration of minorities into the educational, political, and economic mainstream through equal educational opportunity. This study examines the difficulties of creating a unitary public school system and developing a plan that would provide an equal educational opportunity to the large Hispanic minority.

Since Denver was founded in 1858 by William Larimer as a stopping point for victims of “gold fever” after the discovery of...

Interdistrict school desegregation is rare. Three cities have implemented interdistrict student transfer plans under court orders, and a few other cities have voluntarily instituted very limited interdistrict student transfer programs.¹ Interdistrict school desegregation in St. Louis is a unique example of this rare phenomenon. St. Louis adopted and implemented a substantial, voluntary interdistrict student transfer program as a settlement of an interdistrict school desegregation case. It is the only city in the United States that has resolved interdistrict school desegregation issues through a process of compromise and consent.

In the 1987–1988 school year, 10,971 black students from the city...

The story of Chicago’s desegregation settlement is one that must be told for its singularity in employing the judicial process exclusively at the remedial stage of a litigation. Chicago’s tale is not the usual one of competing arguments regarding the existence of discrimination; there were no student plaintiffs telling tales of woe, no witnesses testifying to the school Board’s segregationist policies, no experts expounding on the damaging effects of discrimination, and no court-appointed Masters to supervise the integration effort. Why? Because in Chicago there was no trial.

On the same day that the U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the...

The school desegregation cases have produced profound changes in American society. The holding inBrown v. Board of Education¹ that separate schools are “inherently unequal” heralded the civil rights movement of the sixties.² The decision inBrown II³ to remand the cases to the trial courts for implementation of the constitutional principles declared inBrown Ithrust the federal district judges into an unfamiliar and unwelcome position of prominence, and often notoriety, in their communities.

Whether legal scholars label the school desegregation cases public law, institutional reform, extended impact, or frontier litigation, they agree that the cases marked the emergence...

In 1976, derrick bell wrote a heretical article.¹ The former NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund (LDF) staff attorney² posited a dilemma confronting many plaintiffs’ lawyers in school desegregation cases. Two “masters,” clients and organizational employer, vied for the attorneys’ loyalty.

According to Bell, in many cases these masters had conflicting objectives. Black parents wanted the best education for their children; national organizations, such as the NAACP³ and LDF, were committed to a nationwide program of school desegregation. In Bell’s view, better-funded and better-managed neighborhood schools even if not integrated, might be preferred by some local black plaintiffs. However, such...