Court Opinion

ID: 9427695
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:36.260035+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:09.156280
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rehnquist,
with whom Me. Justice Powell joins, dissenting.
For the reasons set out in my dissent in Columbus Board of Education v. Penick, ante, p. 489, I cannot join the Court’s opinion in this case. Both the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and this Court used their respective Columbus opinions as a roadmap, and for the reasons I could not subscribe to the affirmative duty, the foreseeability test, the cavalier treatment of causality, and the false hope of Keyes and Swann rebuttal in Columbus, I cannot subscribe to them here. Little would be gained by another “blow-by-blow” recitation in dissent of how the Court’s cascade of presumptions in this case sweeps away the distinction between de jacto and de jure segregation.
In its haste to affirm the Court of Appeals, the Court barely breaks stride to note that there was some “overreading of Swann” in the Court of Appeals’ conclusion that there was a “dual” school system at the time of Brown I, and that the court had the wrong conception of segregative intent, i. e., the mysterious Oliver standard which this Court thinks the Court of Appeals talks a lot about but never really applies. Ante, at 536 n. 9. But as the Court more candidly recognizes in this case, the affirmative duty renders any discussion of segrega-*543tive intent after 1954 gratuitous anyway. The Court is also more honest about the stringency of the standard by which all post-1954 conduct is to be judged: “[T]he Board has a ‘ “heavy burden” ’ of showing that actions that increased or continued the effects of the dual [school] system serve important and legitimate ends.” Ante, at 538 (emphasis added).
I think that the Columbus and Dayton District Court opinions point out the limitation of my Brother Stewart’s perception of the proper roles of the trial judge and reviewing courts. That this and other appellate courts must defer to the factfindings of trial courts is unexceptionable. With the aid of this observation, he concludes that the Court of Appeals should be affirmed in Columbus, insofar as it agreed with the District Court there, and should be reversed here because it upset the District Court’s conclusion that there was no warrant for a desegregation remedy. But even a casual reading of the District Court opinions makes it very clear that the primary determinants of the different results in these two cases were two totally different conceptions of the law and methodology that govern school desegregation litigation. The District Judge in Dayton did not employ a post-1954 “affirmative duty” test. Violations he did identify were found not to have any causal relationship to existing conditions of segregation in the Dayton school system. He did not employ a foreseeability test for intent, hold the school system responsible for residential segregation, or impugn the neighborhood school policy as an explanation for some existing one-race schools. In short, the Dayton and Columbus District Judges had completely different ideas of what the law required. As I am sure my Brother Stewart agrees, it is for reviewing courts to make those requirements clear.
Thus, the District Court opinions in these two cases demonstrate dramatically the hazards presented by the laissez-faire theory of appellate review in school desegregation cases. And *544I have no doubt that the Court of Appeals’ heavyhanded approach in this case is to some degree explained by the perceived inequity of imposing a systemwide racial-balance remedy on Columbus while finding no violation in Dayton.* The simple meting out of equal remedies, however, is not by any means “equal justice under law.”

The Court of Appeals did not even remand to allow the Dayton school authorities the opportunity to show that a more limited remedy was warranted, even though the Court of Appeals made findings of fact with respect to liability that had never been made before by any court in this long litigation, and therefore were never part of a remedy hearing. This doubtlessly reflects the Court of Appeals’ honest appraisal of the futility of attempts at Swann rebuttal by the school board.