This essay takes up two separate but related issues: how the courts have resolved disputes over race and schooling and how they should resolve such disputes. This essay is in reply to a related essay, in which another author identified the consequences of what he perceived as a minimalist judicial role and called for greater exercise of…

Kirp examines the evolution of Supreme Court doctrine since the Brown decision, the course of specific desegregation cases, and the interchange between political institutions and the courts at the local level. He reveals that the decision-making process in school desegregation is both political and constitutional. (Author/SK)

This report attempts to illustrate how courts have undertaken the task of relating the constitutional mandate for equal educational opportunity to the political and institutional issues posed in specific school desegregation cases since the Supreme Court's Brown decision. The first section of the report is an introduction to legalism and politics…