Cooper v. Aaron

Cooper v. Aaron
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued September 11, 1958 Decided September 12, 1958
Full case name	William G. Cooper, et al., Members of the Board of Directors of the Little Rock, Arkansas, Independent School District, and Virgial T. Blossom, Superintendent of Schools v. John Aaron, et al.
Citations	358 U.S. 1 (more) 78 S. Ct. 1401; 3 L. Ed. 2d 5; 1958 U.S. LEXIS 657; 79 Ohio L. Abs. 452
Prior history	Suspension of order granted, 163 F. Supp. 13 (E.D. Ark 1958); reversed, 257 F.2d 33 (8th Cir. 1958)
Subsequent history	Opinion announced September 29, 1958
Holding
The states are bound by the Court's decisions, and cannot choose to ignore them. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed.
Court membership
Chief Justice Earl Warren Associate Justices Hugo Black · Felix Frankfurter William O. Douglas · Harold H. Burton Tom C. Clark · John M. Harlan II William J. Brennan, Jr. · Charles E. Whittaker
Case opinions
Majority	Warren, Black, Frankfurter, Douglas, Burton, Clark, Harlan, Brennan, Whittaker
Concurrence	Frankfurter
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV; Supremacy Clause

Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958)^[1], was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which held that the states were bound by the Court's decisions, and could not choose to ignore them.

Background of the case

See also: Little Rock Nine and Southern Manifesto

In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the school district of Little Rock, Arkansas formulated a plan to desegregate its schools. Meanwhile, other school districts in the state opposed the Supreme Court's rulings and attempted to find ways to perpetuate segregation. The Arkansas state legislature amended the state constitution to oppose desegregation, and then passed a law relieving children from mandatory attendance at segregated schools. The school board of Little Rock nevertheless continued with the desegregation program. On February 20, 1958, five months after the integration crisis involving the Little Rock Nine, members of the school board (along with the Superintendent of Schools) filed suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, urging suspension of its plan of desegregation. They alleged that public hostility to desegregation and the opposition of Governor Orval Faubus and the state legislature created an intolerable and chaotic situation. The relief the plaintiffs requested was for the African-American children to be returned to segregated schools and for the implementation of the desegregation plan to be postponed for two and a half years. The district court granted the school board's request, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed. Prior to the Eighth Circuit's decision, the Supreme Court had denied the defendants' request to decide the case without waiting for the appeals court to deliberate on the case.

The court's decision

In an opinion signed by every justice, the Court noted that the school board had acted in good faith, and that most of the problems stemmed from the official opposition of the Arkansas state government to racial integration in both word and deed. Nonetheless, it was constitutionally impermissible under the Equal Protection Clause to maintain law and order by depriving the black students their equal rights under the law.

More importantly, the Court held that since the Supremacy Clause of Article VI made the U.S. Constitution the supreme law of the land, and because Marbury v. Madison gave the Supreme Court the power of judicial review,^[1] then the precedent set forth in Brown v. Board of Education is the supreme law of the land, and is therefore binding on all the states, regardless of any state laws contradicting it. The Court therefore rejected the contention that the Arkansas legislature and Governor were not bound by the Brown decision.

The Supreme Court rejected the doctrines of nullification and interposition, which had been invoked by segregationists. Segregation supporters argued that the states have the power to nullify federal laws or court rulings that they believe to be unconstitutional, and that the states could use this power to nullify the Brown decision. The Arkansas laws that attempted to prevent desegregation were Arkansas' effort to nullify the Brown decision. The Supreme Court held that the Brown decision "can neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes for segregation." Thus, Cooper v. Aaron held that state attempts to nullify federal law are ineffective.

Moreover, since public officials are required to swear an oath to uphold the Constitution (as per Article VI, Clause 3), for these same officials to ignore the Court's precedents is equal to a violation of that oath. Even though education is the responsibility of the state government, that responsibility must be carried out in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment.

Critical response

Many legal scholars criticized the Court's rationale in Cooper. Perhaps the most famous criticism of the case was that of former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, in his law review article entitled The Law of the Constitution. There, Meese accused the Court of taking too much power for itself by setting itself up as the sole institution responsible for the interpretation of the Constitution. He wrote that while judicial interpretation of the Constitution binds the parties of the case, it should not establish a supreme law of the land which must be accepted by all persons.

See also

• List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 358

Notes

1. ^ Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury that "[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is".

Sources

• Farber, Daniel A.; Eskridge, William N., Jr.; Frickey, Philip P. Constitutional Law: Themes for the Constitution's Third Century. Thomson-West Publishing, 2003. ISBN 0-314-14353-X
• Hall, Kermit L. ed. The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, Second Edition. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-517661-2
• Freyer, Tony A. Little Rock on Trial: Cooper v. Aaron and School Desegregation. Lawrence (KS), 2007.

External links

• ^ Text of Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958) is available from: Justia · Findlaw

• Summary of case from OYEZ
• Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture entry: Aaron v. Cooper