Abstract
The Supreme Court's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (Parents Involved) presents the seeming paradox that the Constitution can on one day require a school district to take drastic measures, including busing students across a giant school district to increase racial integration in schools, and then prohibit school districts from taking even the mildest measures, such as using race as a tie-breaker in making student assignments, on the next. How, a rational observer must wonder, can this be possible? The answer is that, as usual in the making of “constitutional law,” the Constitution has nothing to do with it. It is the entirely logical, though paradoxical, result of a long-established irrational and deceptive system of lawmaking by the Supreme Court on the subject of race and the schools. Because the requirement of integration was falsely and illogically justified as only a remedy for segregation, opponents of compulsory integration can find the requirement inapplicable in any given case by simply pointing out that there is no segregation to be remedied, as they did in Parents Involved.
Recommended Citation
Lino A. Graglia, Solving the Parents Involved Paradox, 31 SEATTLE U. L. REV. 911 (2008).
