Courts cannot be credited or blamed for effects they may not have caused.

Evidence

Disentangling whether judicial decisions or other factors produced particular effects may also be difficult. Take, for example, the phenomenon of “white flight”—that is, the movement of white families and their school-aged children from urban to suburban school districts. Opponents of court-ordered busing charged that it produced white flight and that judicial policies aimed at promoting integration were counterproductive, leading instead to racial isolation for minority students in urban school districts. Other commentators, however, denied that courtordered busing precipitated the white exodus from the cities and urban school districts. The population shift, they maintained, was a national phenomenon not limited to municipalities with court-ordered busing, and busing itself did not accelerate the process. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3208

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘white flight’ and stages the causal dispute over whether court-ordered busing produced it.
• XREF: Connects to the course theme that judicial impact is contingent and hard to isolate from other social forces.