Court Opinion

ID: 9420108
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:59.131105+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:22.418797
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Rutledge,
dissenting.
I am unable to join in the Court’s opinion or in its disposition of the petition. In my judgment neither the action taken by the Supreme Court of Oklahoma nor that of the District Court of Cleveland County, following upon the decision and issuance of our mandate in No. 369, Sipuel v. Board of Regents, 332 U. S. 631, is consistent with our opinion in that cause or therefore with our mandate which issued forthwith.1
It is possible under those orders for the state’s officials to dispose of petitioner’s demand for a legal education equal to that afforded to white students by establishing overnight a separate law school for Negroes or to continue affording the present advantages to white students while denying them to petitioner. The latter could be done either by excluding all applicants for admission to the first-year class of the state university law school after the date of the District Court’s order or, depending upon the meaning of that order, by excluding such applicants and asking all first-year students enrolled prior to that order’s date to withdraw from school.
Neither of those courses, in my opinion, would comply with our mandate. It plainly meant, to me at any *152rate, that Oklahoma should end the discrimination practiced against petitioner at once, not at some later time, near or remote. It also meant that this should be done, if not by excluding all students, then by affording petitioner the advantages of a legal education equal to those afforded to white students. And in my comprehension the equality required was equality in fact, not in legal fiction.
Obviously no separate law school could be established elsewhere overnight capable of giving petitioner a legal education equal to that afforded by the state’s long-established and well-known state university law school. Nor could the necessary time be taken to create such facilities, while continuing to deny them to petitioner, without incurring the delay which would continue the discrimination our mandate required to end at once. Neither would the state comply with it by continuing to deny the required legal education to petitioner while affording it to any other student, as it could do by excluding only students in the first-year class from the state university law school.
Since the state courts’ orders allow the state authorities at their election to pursue alternative courses, some of which do not comply with our mandate, I think those orders inconsistent with it. Accordingly I dissent from the Court’s opinion and decision in this case.

 The mandate reversed the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s judgment and remanded the cause to it “for proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.”