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🪵 The Threshold

Judicial rulings often fail to secure compliance or resolve conflict

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tagsja-picks, xref, question, deepthinking, addendum, causal_relationships, trade, corroborated, category/causal-relationships

4 min read

Judicial rulings often fail to secure compliance or resolve conflict

Evidence

In this respect, Bakke is hardly unique. Although judicial rulings may establish legal obligations, those affected by a ruling may refuse to comply with it. For example, a decade after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education and ordered the elimination of racially segregated dual school systems, less than 2 percent of black children in the South were attending integrated schools. Rather than endorsing judicial rulings, public officials may ignore them, attack them, or attempt to overturn them. For instance, in the 1990s, many members of Congress pushed for a constitutional amendment to override a Supreme Court’s ruling that the First Amendment protected the burning of the American flag as a form of symbolic protest.*° Groups also may reject judicial rulings and organize to oppose them in other political arenas. One example of this is the right-to-life movement, which emerged as a national movement during the 1970s and 1980s in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, which announced a constitutional right to obtain an abortion.”’ Indeed, the controversy engendered by the Supreme Court’s abortion rulings suggests that judicial rulings sometimes aggravate rather than resolve policy disputes. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 211

Affirmative action programs have not disappeared in the decades since Bakke. Rather, they have expanded—indeed, the University of California at Davis itself introduced a new affirmative action admissions program. Nor did the decision end conflict over affirmative action. In 1996, California voters approved an initiative (Proposition 209) to terminate affirmative action programs for hiring and admissions at the state’s colleges and universities, prompting California’s government to revise admission standards for the state’s universities to ensure diversity within the student population.** And in 2003, the Supreme Court revisited the issue of affirmative action in university admissions, striking down one program at the University of Michigan but upholding another.** Once again voters reacted, amending the Michigan Constitution to foreclose racial preferences in admissions. And in 2016 a sharply divided Supreme Court upheld an affirmative action program at the University of Texas.?> Thus, instead of establishing public policy, the Court’s ruling in Bakke turned out to be merely one skirmish in an ongoing policy dispute. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 210

Categorization

  • XREF: Central to the course claim that courts lack enforcement power and depend on political acceptance; the Brown compliance figure grounds the common reliance-on-other-branches point. Also echoes Dahl’s and Rosenberg’s arguments about court limits. — connects to: Judicial rulings often fail without compliance and political support — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 198; Legal obligation alone does not secure compliance with judicial rulings — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3187; Courts cannot ensure their rulings reach large target populations — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 3193 (+14 more)
  • QUESTION: Worth chasing: the ‘less than 2 percent’ Brown integration figure and its sourcing (Rosenberg’s The Hollow Hope), and whether later accounts revise that estimate.
  • DEEPTHINKING: Less a dense theory passage than a pivotal empirical foundation for assessing the ‘judicial policymaking’ premise — decidability here is more that it anchors one of the course’s central questions (do courts effectively make policy?) with concrete facts.
  • ADDENDUM: The Bakke-to-2016 arc could feed the sacrifice/grafting essays only tenuously; more relevantly it supports a follow-up on how rights rulings behave as skirmishes in ongoing political contests rather than settlements.
  • corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 211; G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 210

Broader Connections

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