Today in Supreme Court History: September 7, 1958

9/7/1958: The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas denied the Little Rock School Board's petition to suspend its integration program. In Cooper v. Aaron (1958), the Supreme Court ordered the integration of Central High School.

Comments

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Josh Blackman talks about the case:

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/georgetown-law-journal/in-print/volume-107/volume-107-issue-5-may-2019/cooper-v-aaron/

You can listen to CJ Earl Warren announce the order announced before the opinion was released:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/1957/1_misc

OTD in 2018, an application to vacate a stay submitted by Kagan to the Court was denied. Ginsburg and Sotomayor would have granted the stay.

A. PHILIP RANDOLPH INST., ET AL. V. JOHNSON, MI SEC. OF STATE involved the implementation of a state election law which eliminated straight party voting in Michigan. The district court blocked it as racially discriminatory, but the court of appeals put it back in force.

The “Purcell Principle” was involved. None of the justices explained their votes.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Uhler v. AFL-CIO, 105 S.Ct. 5 (decided September 7, 1984): Rehnquist says federal courts have no jurisdiction to stay California Supreme Court’s striking from the ballot a referendum requiring the legislature to apply to Congress for a Constitutional Convention to add a “Balanced Budget Amendment”; California court had held that under Article V of the U.S. Constitution a Convention can be called only by the State Legislatures on their own initiative (and not as directed by referendum) and also that referendum was improper under the California Constitution (the Balanced Budget Amendment, pushed by Reagan-era Republicans -- a new definition of “chutzpah” -- fell two states short of the two-thirds required under Article V, and also failed to make it via the other Article V route, passage of two-thirds of each House of Congress)

[Krayt]

Reasonable. I am no fan of simple majorities to make constitutional-level changes. If you cannot get most people, not just a simple majority, to agree how government should operate, it probably shouldn’t be adopted.

Even The Will of the People, as idiotic euphemism for 50.1%, carries insufficient authority. And I say this with full-throated support for a balanced budget.

The Will of the People, as simple majority, vs. supermajority, is an odd beast. In the 1990s, when the Senate debated sending such an amendment out to the states, Robert Byrd stood there and lamented how it would “thwart the will of the people”, because of its requirement for supermajority to borrow, not just simple majority.

That the supermajority had greater will-o-the-people justification power than a simple majority, so it’s even more pure to the concept for The People to limit themselves, never entered his thoughts.

A tear rolled down his eye that a supermajority would have the temerity to thwart the holy power of simple majority.

[Dilan Esper]

Interestingly, the Court's rejection of the strong form of the independent state legislature theory means that the California case may be wrongly decided, at least as a matter of federal law.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Little known fact (I don't know if it happened on this day), but MLK Jr. was convicted of sodomy and put to death.

[not guilty]

Is that as true as everything else you have said, TIP?

[TwelveInchPianist]

Of course. I mean, sure the records say he was acquitted, but as any amateur historian with an English degree knows, "acquitted" is an old legal term that means convicted of sodomy and executed.