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In this video Shapiro claims that "black schools" were shut down to "meet the standard set by the Supreme Court" in "Milligan (?)", a case from 1980.
MILLIKEN was in 1974, it LIMITED desegregation, and it had nothing to do the mix of students in a school.
MILLIKEN was in 1974, it LIMITED desegregation, and it had nothing to do the mix of students in a school.
Like I cannot overstate how much what he's saying is word salad. It's as if he glanced at a law review article about desegregation, picked out some random dates, some random case names, and blended them together with bog-standard right-wing talking points about race quotas.
Milliken is itself probably the most widely-misunderstood component of school desegregation law. To the extent people talk about it, they usually claim that it forbids desegregation plans from reaching across school district borders. But that's not correct.
The real Milliken is a bizarre, narrow, but consequential decision. What it says is that, specifically, FEDERAL courts can't force local units of government into integration plan unless they were found to have participated in the original segregated system.
The decision is based on a never-before-mentioned principle of local sovereignty: the idea that locally controlled schools are a "deeply rooted tradition" that, for some reason, it would be unconstitutional to violate - even to remedy the constitutional violation of segregation.
Did I mention that Milliken appeared after Nixon appointed 4 (!) SCOTUS justices at the height of the backlash to school desegregation? Did I mention that it's been reported that before appointing Rehnquist, Nixon secured a promise from him to limit busing? Potentially relevant.
Anyway, because at the time most desegregation orders were federal court orders, Milliken had a huge impact, especially in the North, where districts were fragmented between different cities. (The South, which had countywide districts, was less affected.)
But Milliken's reasoning is limited to the specific case of federal court orders.
It doesn't impact impact voluntary interdistrict remedies, it doesn't limit state courts at all, and it doesn't limit what federal courts can do if discrimination occurs across multiple districts.
It doesn't impact impact voluntary interdistrict remedies, it doesn't limit state courts at all, and it doesn't limit what federal courts can do if discrimination occurs across multiple districts.
Anyway, congrats! Now you know 4000% more about Milliken than Ben Shapiro.
