Law Commons^™

Inequitable Schools Demand A Federal Remedy, Kimberly J. Robinson

Law Faculty Publications

It is not often that the U.S. Supreme Court admits that one of its previous decisions, especially one that shaped the fabric of our nation, was fundamentally wrong. One such instance occurred in 1954, when the court famously declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, that the doctrine of “separate but equal” public schools for black children and white children was unconstitutional. In Brown, the court overturned, for public schools, its approval of this doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and established that segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court also proclaimed that …

Governance Of Steel And Kryptonite Politics In Contemporary Public Education Reform, James S. Liebman, Elizabeth R. Cruikshank, Christina C. Ma

Faculty Scholarship

Entrenched bureaucracies and special-interest politics hamper public education in the United States. In response, school districts and states have recently adopted or promoted reforms designed to release schools from bureaucratic control and empower them to meet strengthened outcome standards. Despite promising results, the reforms have been widely criticized, including by the educationally disadvantaged families they most appear to help.

To explain this paradox, this Article first considers the governance alternatives to bureaucracy that the education reforms adopt. It concludes that the reforms do not adopt the most commonly cited alternatives to bureaucracy — marketization, managerialism, or professionalism/craft — and that …

Perpetual Evolution: A School's-Focused Public Law Litigation Model For Our Day, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In celebrating the monumental accomplishments of the new form of public law litigation that Constance Baker Motley and her colleagues pioneered, this Essay reinterprets their paradigm-shifting body of work in a manner that obliges the current generation of civil rights advocates to change direction. In the hopes of reengaging the affirmative force of constitutional litigation after decades in which it has waned, this Essay argues that the central lesson to be derived from Motley’s generation lies not in the mode of public law litigation it pioneered but in the design of that litigation in the image of the dominant form …