FLASH: The Fordham Law Archive of Scholarship and History
Abstract
Courts are currently concerned over the extent of their powers to integrate racially separate housing and schools within metropolitan areas containing black inner cities and white suburbs. This Comment reviews the jurisprudence addressing when it is a proper exercise of a court\u27s equity jurisdiction to fashion a metropolitan or interdistrict remedial order in which the city and its surrounding suburbs are treated as one system. The Comment focuses on the recent Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley, in which the Court reversed a decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld the district court\u27s power to order enforcement of a plan that would have integrated the schools of up to fifty-four school districts in Detroit. The Court held that an interdistrict remedy is dependent on finding an interdistrict constitutional violation, which it found was not present in the Milliken case. The Comment observes that Milliken was the first time since Brown I that the Court had reversed a lower court order which sought to promote the integration of the races after finding unconstitutional segregation. It thus concludes that the history of the Supreme Court as an instrument of reversing the separation of the races has entered a new phase
