Parents Involved --???? Forum

[turbotong]

Anyone taking con law wana help me out with Parents Involved?
Plurality, majority, narrowest opinion, concurrences... I'm not quite sure what is good law to take away, so here are my questions:

What is binding law regarding the following issues:
1. Diversity in lower/all education as a compelling interest
2. Racial balancing as a compelling interest

[leobowski]

Get ahold of the chemerinsky hornbook and look up the case in the case index. Done.

[zomginternets]

Get ahold of the chemerinsky hornbook and look up the case in the case index. Done.

+1. Chemerinsky is GOD for con law.

[vanwinkle]

Narrowest opinion is basically where Kennedy agrees with Roberts, since only there do you have 5 justices agreeing on an issue at stake in the case. Basically, the narrow agreement is that the Seattle scheme violated the 14th Amendment.

The parts where Roberts argues pretty much any scheme with a racial component is unconstitutional isn't binding, because Kennedy doesn't agree with going that far. The four dissenters point out that they and Kennedy agree that some race-factoring schemes may be constitutional, but that's not binding because that's no longer an issue in the case (once you've decided that the Seattle scheme is unconstitutional, asking whether every scheme ever would be is irrelevant).

Upshot: Focus on what Kennedy and Roberts agree on. That's binding. The rest shouldn't be binding, though it's certainly indicative of what could happen next time.

[turbotong]

My discounted 3rd edition of chemerinsky doesn't have it... =*(

[Geist13]

This is totally off the top of my head, but this is what i remember. The seattle program wasn't remedial since the district was never segregated. Thus, it was facially discriminatory and invalid. The court may have done some more analysis than that but it was probably unnecessary. The St. Louis program (or whatever city it was) was remedial, but it had been like 38 years since brown or something like that. The district efforts were considered to be very successful at desegregating the schools, but the local populations remained largely segregated, so when the school eliminated the programs the schools were segregated again. Basically the court said, yeah, it's been so long since the schools were desegregated that there is no longer a causal connection between the de jure discrimination and the racially unmixed (that's probably a bad word) populations. The district court did not have any power to order more desegregation measures because according to the post-Brown cases, the district court's power was limited to eliminating de jure segregation and its lingering effects. If the lack of racial diversity can no longer be understood as the "effect" of de jure segregation, the court can't order more measures to be taken.

That's what I remember anyway.

Edit: I guess I didn't really answer your questions. However, after a full year of conlaw, I've come to the conclusion that what is "binding" precedent and what isn't is entirely irrelevant.

[AreJay711]

Well, my breeze through of Parents Involved was that race balancing for the sake of race balancing is not constitutional. Unlike Grutter, they are not arguing that there is some benefit being conferred from diversity or anything. But I think maybe we have more to do in class.

[Renzo]

Upshot: Focus on what Kennedy and Roberts agree on. That's binding. The rest shouldn't be binding, though it's certainly indicative of what could happen next time.

Yep. Basically, the part that matters is that the school district was not seeking to remedy the direct effects of it's own past discrimination, since it never had Jim Crow laws. Therefore, using facially race-based criteria to assign schools violates the 14th A.