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School Desegregation: A Lawyer's View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Harold W. Horowitz
Harold W. Horowitz*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
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The Office of Education's report, Equality of Educational Opportunity (the Coleman Report), and the Civil Rights Commission's report, Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, have, to say the least, fundamental implications for the formulation of educational policy in the United States. Aside from their impact on legislative and administrative policymakers, and the electorate which selects those policy-makers, these reports have a separate significance for the law. They provide data essential to the resolution of current issues of the constitutional doctrine which makes up the legal matrix within which educational policy-making takes place. Further, they suggest new issues of equal import on which future programs and studies must be undertaken. The case studies in Desegregation and Education are illustrative: a number of cities have seen threatened and actual law suits to bring about elimination of de facto racial segregation in the public schools, and school administrators are concerned at the lack of sufficiently clear legal doctrine. Recently, in Hobson v. Hansen, a case dealing with the District of Columbia public schools, Judge J. Skelly Wright made use of some of the data in the reports in ordering the school board to take various steps to deal with inequalities in educational opportunity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , November 1967 , pp. 119 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © 1967 by the Law and Society Association

References

1. 269 F. Supp. 401 (1967).

2. J. Coleman et al., Equality of Educational Opportunity 21 (1966).

3. U. S. Comm'n on Civil Rights, 1 Racial Isolation in the Public Schools 205 (1967).

4. Id. at 17 n. 1.

5. 377 U.S. 533 (1964).

6. 383 U.S. 663 (1966).

7. Hobson v. Hansen, supra note 1, at 510.

8. Id. at 510.

9. See, e.g., Jackson v. Pasadena City School Dist., 59 Cal. 2d 876, 382 P.2d 878, 31 Cal. Rptr. 606 (1963).

10. 380 U.S. 89 (1965).

11. Hobson v. Hansen, supra note 1, at 515.

12. Hall v. St. Helena Parish School Bd., 197 F. Supp. 649 (E.D. La. 1961), aff'd, 368 U.S. 515 (1962). See also, Griffin v. County School Bd., 377 U.S. 218 (1964).