The call for studies of the social impact of particular judicial, legislative, administrative and executive rules, decisions and practices is sounded sporadically and acted upon but rarely. To read the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States overruling established precedents in many areas of our constitutional law is to catalogue a long list of missed opportunities for social scientists. As an example of the cause for this lament, I shall present Keyishian v. Board of Regents which for all practical purposes overruled Adler v. Board of Education.

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.

The controlled experiment is undoubtedly the ideal instrument for testing the effectiveness of a new rule of law or legal procedure: have one random half of the cases operate under the new rule, the other half under the old rule, and see what difference there is in the outcome.

There is a tough question in the sociology of law facing the nation. It is: To what extent is the inferior education of Negroes due to a failure to enforce the fourteenth amendment, which requires that the states must treat all its citizens equally and without discrimination? There may be more felicitous phrasings of the problem, but this puts it bluntly.

By way of introducing this column, I should like to sketch briefly a picture of the major current programs which have developed under the aegis of the Russell Sage Foundation. These impressions are based on a review of grant applications and annual reports on file with the Russell Sage Foundation, on my own experiences working at Berkeley and at Denver, and on visits by my New York University colleagues to the Sage-sponsored centers at Wisconsin and Northwestern.

Perhaps the most arresting conclusion in the summary of the Coleman Report is the statement: “a pupil's achievement is strongly related to the educational backgrounds and aspirations of the other students in the school” (p. 22). The point is stated more forcefully later, in the body of the Report: “Attributes of other students account for far more variation in the achievement of minority group children than do any attributes of school facilities and slightly more than do attributes of staff” (p. 302). I always thought so. I like this finding because it coincides with my own views about social democracy and the schools. This was forcefully expressed in 1950 by Chief Justice Vinson, when the Supreme Court ruled racial isolation of a single Negro in the Texas Law School constitutionally unequal on grounds that fellowship and extracurricular association with other students were as essential to legal education as were equivalent teachers, books, and lessons. Now in the Coleman Report there is persuasiveness in documentation and analysis for this view which is more convincing than personal or judicial opinion. This is one of several points I have selected for comment from a series of recent social science reports on race as a factor in national school policy. In looking directly at only a few points one can merely pause to salute the energy, daring, intelligence, and skill of the social scientists who have prepared these stimulating, impressive, and important documents.