In June of 2007, the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007; hereafter Parents). In his plurality opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that the Fourteenth Amendment requires school districts to assign students “to the public schools on a nonracial basis” (Parents 2007, 84) and therefore prohibits the race-conscious programs in the Seattle and Louisville school districts designed to promote racial diversity. Sharon Browne, the principal attorney for the parents challenging the school's assignment process, called the rulings “the most important decisions on the use of race since Brown v. Board of Education” (Rosen 2007) and predicted that, like Brown, the Court's ruling would have “a tremendous impact on the rest of the nation” (Lambert 2007).

However, several legal scholars disagreed: “School districts are going to continue to do indirectly what they tried to do directly,” said Peter H. Schuck of the Yale Law School.