Court Hears Cases on Schools and Race

Both set goals for white and minority representation at schools and, along with other factors, made decisions about school assignments based on a student's race. The previous time Seattle used the system -- it has stopped because of the litigation -- about 100 minority students and 200 white students didn't get their first choice.

The Louisville-Jefferson County plan was implemented after the school system emerged from a 25-year desegregation plan overseen by the federal courts. The goal was to maintain the racial integration it had achieved.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that the federal government was now challenging a system it had once championed.

"What's constitutionally required one day gets constitutionally prohibited the next day," she mused. "That's very odd."

Along with the other liberal justices -- John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer -- she seemed to agree that a limited use of race to maintain a more integrated system should be sanctioned.

It set up an interesting debate among the justices in which the liberals argued for a deference to local officials who have found a system that for the most part their constituents like, and conservatives arguing for the strict color-blind protections of the 14th Amendment.

Roberts noted that in segregated school systems, students were also guaranteed a spot, but "because they were assigned to those seats on the basis of race, it violated equal protection."

Ginsburg responded that questioning whether using racial criterion to achieve integration "is the same as segregation, it seems to me is pretty far from the kind of headlines that attended the Brown decision."