Document Type

Article

Publication Title

California Law Review

Abstract

Although the language of proximate cause might not capture all the truths about problems of causation, it does capture at least one. There comes a point at which it no longer makes sense to scour the world for remote antecedents of particular harms. The further back one goes, the less the map of causation will look like a river surging toward the sea, and the more it will resemble a delicate network of capillaries meandering toward a common destination, with no dominant beginning or end. Concentrating on the "proximate" identifies the events likely to have had the greatest impact. It is by focusing on these sources that law and administration can exert the greatest control. One might look to see if A made B hit C, but one will not conduct, at least within the framework of litigation, a sociological inquiry into all the past influences that could have led the young A to perform an asocial act years later. Thus, while we might peek past the proximate cause, we never travel very far in tort down the road toward remote antecedents, and we are all the better for the truncation of this causal journey. A quick glance at the Supreme Court's decision last year in Missouri v. Jenkins (Jenkins III) reveals that no such principle of prudence reigns in the de jure school desegregation cases still before the Court over forty years after Brown v. Board of Education. In an age when pressing educational problems are everywhere around us, time has stood still for the federal courts that heroically struggle to eliminate the "last vestiges" of segregation by remedies that have become at once more draconian, unfocused, and futile as the years creak by. The purpose of this short Article is to deplore this remedial trend and to urge the Supreme Court to abandon now the hapless search for legal remedies for the remote causes of a present unpalatable state of affairs. The process of mending-or ending-public education should be conducted by fashioning the best responses we can to the challenges the system now faces, without being deflected by a misguided search for the rectification of past wrongs.

First Page

1101

DOI

https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38Q149

Volume

84

Publication Date

1996

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