Vague Supreme Court rulings let lower courts read civil rights decisions narrowly.

Evidence

In the absence of guidance from the Court, some federal judges used their discretion to narrow the effect of Brown, maintaining that it merely required the use of race-neutral criteria for assigning pupils. Thus, school districts could meet their constitutional obligations even if their schools remained almost completely segregated. … They would no sooner invalidate one law than the state legislature would pass another, mirroring the Southern saying, “As long as we can legislate, we can segregate.” … As Figure 10.1 shows, as late as 1963, less than 1 percent of black students in the South were attending school with white children. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2999

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the course goal of linking judicial interpretation to outcomomes — interpretive discretion, not the text of Brown, determined how much desegregation actually occurred. — connects to: Even segregationist judges reluctantly followed Supreme Court rulings on property — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 167
• SEED: Angle: ‘When the Court refuses to clarify’ — the cost of Brown’s ambiguous remedial language and the case for specificity in rights rulings.
• CANDY: The ‘arthritic snail’ quip nearby and the ‘as long as we can legislate, we can segregate’ saying are elevator-ready historical details.