In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court observed that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and held that it was a public service that “must be made available to all on equal terms.” While Brown removed one obvious barrier to equal educational opportunities, it left in place another: the obstacle faced by poor school districts that wish to provide an education to their students “on equal terms” relative to the education offered by wealthier school districts within a State.
Nineteen years after Brown, the Court decided another equal-protection case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which gave the Court an opportunity to remove, or at least ameliorate, wealth-based barriers to equal educational opportunities as well. But the Court rejected the plaintiffs’ claims. This Essay explains what happened in Rodriguez, describes what happened in the States in the thirty-five years after Rodriguez and raises some questions prompted by the experience.
Essay
The Right to Judicial Review
Judicial review is typically justified on consequentalist grounds, namely that it is conducive to the efficacious protection of rights. This paper disputes this popular explanation for judicial review and argues that judicial review is based on a “right to voice a grievance” or a “right to a hearing” – a right designed to provide an opportunity for the victim of infringement to challenge it. The state must justify, and in appropriate cases, reconsider, any infringement in light of the particular claims and circumstances of the victims of the infringement. This right-based justification implies that judicial review is justified even if it is found that it is ultimately detrimental to the efficacious protection of rights. Last, it is argued that the right to a hearing is a participatory right and consequently that judicial review does not conflict with the right to equal democratic participation.
Authority and Authorities
Although there is a rich jurisprudential literature dealing with the concept of authority in law, the lessons from this jurisprudential tradition have never been connected with the practice by which authorities—cases, statutes, constitutions, regulations, articles, and books, primarily—are a central feature of common law legal argument, legal reasoning, and judicial decision-making. This disconnect between thinking about the nature of authority and reflecting on law’s use of authorities has become even more troublesome of late, because controversies about the citation of foreign law, the increasing use of no-citation and no-precedential-effect rules in federal and state courts, and even such seemingly trivial matters as whether lawyers, judges and legal scholars should cite or rely on Wikipedia all raise central questions about the idea of authority and its special place in legal reasoning. In seeking to close this gap between the jurisprudential lessons and their contemporary application, this Essay casts doubt on the traditional dichotomy between binding and persuasive authority, seeks to understand the distinction among prohibited, permissive, and mandatory legal sources, and attempts to explain the process by which so-called authorities gain (and sometimes lose) their authoritative status.