Board of Education of City of Los Angeles, Applicant, V

448 U.S. 1343, 101 S. Ct. 21, 65 L. Ed. 2d 1166, 1980 U.S. LEXIS 2525
CourtSupreme Court of the United States
DecidedSeptember 12, 1980
DocketA-214
StatusPublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 448 U.S. 1343 (Board of Education of City of Los Angeles, Applicant, V) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of the United States primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Board of Education of City of Los Angeles, Applicant, V, 448 U.S. 1343, 101 S. Ct. 21, 65 L. Ed. 2d 1166, 1980 U.S. LEXIS 2525 (1980).

Opinion

Mr. Justice Rehnquist, Circuit Justice.

The Board of Education of the Los Angeles Unified School District requests that I stay an order of the California Supreme Court, dated August 27, 1980, which left standing an order of the Superior Court of the State of California for Los Angeles County requiring mandatory reassignment of between 80,000 and 100,000 first- through ninth-grade students attending approximately 165 elementary and junior high schools pending consideration by this Court of its petition for certiorari. On July 7, 1980, the Superior Court entered its final remedial order in this action, finding that the Board had participated in racial discriminatory practices which led to the segregation in the school district and requiring the Board to implement a mandatory busing plan pursuant to guidelines contained in the order. The Board applied to the *1344 Court of Appeal of California to stay the Superior Court’s order and, on August 6, 1980, that court partially stayed the order insofar as it relied on a definition of a desegregated school as one where there is a plurality of white students not in excess of 5% over the next largest ethnic group in the school and insofar as it required mandatory busing of students currently attending substantially desegregated schools. The Court of Appeal, however, in all other respects denied the Board’s petition for a stay, thus precipitating the current situation where upwards of 80,000 pupils will be bused at the start of school on Monday, September 16, 1980. The court also accelerated the date of oral argument so that the appeal could be heard in January 1981. On August 27, 1980, the California Supreme Court denied, without opinion, the Board’s application for a writ of mandamus and/or prohibition to stay in its entirety the order of the Superior Court and recommended that the Court of Appeal accelerate oral argument even further. The California Supreme Court also denied a motion by the original plaintiffs in this action, minority schoolchildren, to vacate the partial stay entered by the Court of Appeal.

This case comes to me after extensive and complicated litigation. Briefly stated, in 1970, the Superior Court issued an opinion finding that the segregation in the school district was de jure in nature and that the Board had taken “affirmative” steps which it “knew or should have known” would perpetuate segregation in the district. The specific items detailed in the court’s findings included the Board’s adoption of (1) a neighborhood school policy, (2) an “open transfer” policy, (3) a “feeder school” policy, and (4) “mandatory attendance areas.” In Crawford v. Board of Education, 17 Cal. 3d 280, 551 P. 2d 28 (1976), the California Supreme Court accepted the finding of de jure segregation, but did not base its affirmance of the Superior Court’s order of mandatory busing on that ground, holding instead that the California Con *1345 stitution permitted busing to be ordered regardless of the cause of segregation. On September 8, 1978, I denied a stay for this reason. Bustop, Inc. v. Los Angeles Board of Education, 439 U. S. 1380 (in chambers).

During remand, the California Constitution was amended by way of a state referendum, Proposition I, adopted in November 1979 to eliminate state independent grounds as a basis for court-ordered busing, and the Board contended that the Superior Court’s 10-year-old findings did not justify a finding of a federal constitutional violation or the system-wide remedy of mandatory assignment of children by race. In its July 7, 1980, order, the Superior Court apparently rejected that argument, reasoning that the California Supreme Court, in Crawford, affirmed the finding of de jure segregation. Contrary to the assertions of the respondents, it seems to me that this application necessarily turns on a question of federal constitutional law, as other courts have held. Indeed, I find myself unable to articulate the point better than Judge Cohn of the Superior Court of San Mateo County in Tinsley v. Palo Alto Unified School District, No. 206010 (July 10, 1980):

“Turning to the argument that Proposition I violates the 14th Amendment of the TJ. S. Constitution, inasmuch as it merely limits California courts to what the federal courts can do under the federal constitution, it is indeed difficult to accept the contention that by limiting a state court’s jurisdiction to that of the federal courts, there is somehow a violation of [the] federal constitution.”

There is an initial question as to whether this Court would have jurisdiction over the present action if a petition for writ of certiorari were filed. In Fisher v. District Court, 424 U. S. 382, 385, n. 7 (1976), this Court stated:

“The writ of supervisory control issued by the Montana Supreme Court is a final judgment within our jurisdic *1346 tion under 28 U. S. C. 1 1257 (3). It is available only in original proceedings- of the Montana Supreme Court . . . and although it may issue in a broad range of circumstances, it is not equivalent to an appeal. . . . A judgment that terminates original proceedings in a state appellate court, in which the only issue decided concerns the jurisdiction of a lower state court, is final, even if further proceedings are to be had in the lower court. Madruga v. Superior Court, 346 U. S. 556, 557 n. 1 (1954). . . .”

In this action, the Board’s petition for a writ of mandamus and/or prohibition was a distinct lawsuit which was fully and finally determined by the California Supreme Court’s judgment of August 27, 1980. I am thus persuaded that this Court would in all probability have jurisdiction over the present action should a petition for certiorari be filed by the Board.

There is no question here as to the standing of the Board, since it is a party to an action which has been required by the Superior Court (respondent) to mandatorily reassign an extraordinarily large number of students in what the Board claims is the largest school district in the Nation. There might be some question of “standing” if the petitioners were a group of whites, “Anglos,” or whatever the current terminology used to describe them is, for if the latest 1979 school census submitted by the Board in its application is to be credited, they themselves would be a “minority.” That census indicates that in kindergarten and the first three grades of the school affected by the busing order, students classified as “white” ranged from 17.9% to 21.9% of the school population, those classified as “black” ranged from 18.3% to 22.1%, and those classified as “Hispanic” ranged from 57.8% to 48.9%. Application, at 18 (compiled from trial exhibit 11B).

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Bluebook (online)
448 U.S. 1343, 101 S. Ct. 21, 65 L. Ed. 2d 1166, 1980 U.S. LEXIS 2525, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/board-of-education-of-city-of-los-angeles-applicant-v-scotus-1980.