Court Opinion

ID: 9426980
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:22.008773+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:04.243829
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
with whom Mr. Justice Marshall joins,
dissenting.
The Court’s remand of this case for reconsideration in light of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Dev. Corp., 429 U. S. 252 (1977), and Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, ante, p. 406, is inappropriate because wholly unnecessary. The Court of Appeals concluded that “segregation in the Omaha School District was intentionally created and maintained by the defendants.” 521 F. 2d 530, 532-533 (1975). The petitioners did not contest in the Court of Appeals the finding of the District Court that the Omaha public schools are segregated. Ibid. The Court of Appeals carefully reviewed the abundant evidence in the record bearing on segregative intent and concluded that the evidence justified a presumption that segregative intent permeated petitioners’ policies concerning faculty assignment, student transfers, optional attendance zones, school construction, and the deterioration of the 96% black Tech High School. Id., at 537-546. Relying on Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colo., 413 U. S. 189, 210 (1973), the Court of Appeals further found that the petitioners did not rebut this presumption because they “failed to carry their burden of establishing that segregative intent was not among the factors which motivated their actions.” 521 F. 2d, at 536, 537 (emphasis supplied). We denied certiorari. 423 U. S. 946 (1975). When the case came before the Court *670of Appeals for the second time a year later, the court explicitly reviewed its prior holding in light of our intervening decision in Washington v. Davis, 426 U. S. 229 (1976), and found nothing in that case to cause it to revise its earlier opinion. 641 F. 2d 708,709 (1976).
Arlington Heights, supra, did not make new law, but only applied the holding of Washington v. Davis that discrimination must be purposeful to be unconstitutional. Arlington Heights interpreted Washington v. Davis to mean that an action in which an “invidious discriminatory purpose was a motivating factor” is unconstitutional, and that proof that a decision is “motivated in part by a racially discriminatory purpose” shifts the burden of proof to the alleged discriminator. 429 U. S., at 270-271, n. 21. The conclusion of the Court of Appeals that the defendants “failed to carry their burden of establishing that segregative intent was not among the factors which motivated their actions” was based on language from our decision in Keyes, supra, but it so faithfully applies the Arlington Heights formulation that it reads as if the Court of Appeals had anticipated precisely what Arlington Heights would hold five months later. I cannot imagine that the Court of Appeals will do, or properly can do, anything on remand except reaffirm its judgment with a recitation of its gratification that Arlington Heights had been correctly anticipated.
Dayton, supra, reaffirmed the already well-established principle that the scope of the remedy must be commensurate with the scope of the constitutional violation. Ante, at 420. In this case, the District Court ordered a comprehensive decree to remedy the effects of past discrimination, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. As is evident from a reading of the first Court of Appeals opinion describing the massive systemwide intentional segregation in the Omaha School District, a comprehensive order is entirely appropriate. A less comprehen*671sive order would simply not remedy fully the unconstitutional conditions that have been found to exist in the school system. I would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.