Robinson v. Shelby County Bd. of Educ.

• Decision Date: 21 May 2009
• Docket Number: No. 07-6363.,No. 07-6076.,07-6076.,07-6363.
• Citation: 566 F.3d 642
• Parties: Claude Bernard ROBINSON and Julia D. Robinson, infant, by Melvin Robinson, their father and next friend, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, United States of America, Plaintiff-Intervenor-Appellee/Cross-Appellant, v. SHELBY COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION, Defendant-Appellant/Cross-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

566 F.3d 642

Claude Bernard ROBINSON and Julia D. Robinson, infant, by Melvin Robinson, their father and next friend, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, United States of America, Plaintiff-Intervenor-Appellee/Cross-Appellant, v. SHELBY COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION, Defendant-Appellant/Cross-Appellee.

No. 07-6076.

No. 07-6363.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: July 25, 2008.

Decided and Filed: May 21, 2009.

ARGUED: Valerie Barnes Speakman, Shelby County Schools, Memphis, Tennessee, for Appellant. April J. Anderson, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., for Appellees. ON BRIEF: Valerie Barnes Speakman, Shelby County Schools, Memphis, Tennessee, for Appellant. April J. Anderson, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., for Appellees.

Before: COOK and GRIFFIN, Circuit Judges; MARBLEY, District Judge.^*

GRIFFIN, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which COOK, J., joined. MARBLEY, D.J. (pp. 657-72), delivered a separate dissenting opinion.

OPINION

GRIFFIN, Circuit Judge.

This appeal presents the final chapter in the court-ordered desegregation of the Shelby County, Tennessee, public school system, a process which began forty-five years ago. In 1963, plaintiff public school students¹ filed this class action against defendant Shelby County Board of Education ("Board") alleging unconstitutional racial segregation in the Shelby County schools. In the ensuing period, the district court issued numerous orders requiring the elimination of all vestiges of state-imposed public school segregation in accordance with the mandate of Brown v. Bd. of Educ. of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S.Ct. 686, 98 L.Ed. 873 (1954). A court-approved desegregation plan was implemented and in August 2006, after decades of court supervision, the parties moved jointly to dissolve all outstanding orders, declare the school district a unitary school system, and terminate the litigation. The United States, which has participated as an intervenor since 1966, supported the motion.²

Despite the parties' universal agreement that the goals of the desegregation plan have been satisfactorily fulfilled and that educational parity has been attained, the district court disagreed that the constitutional requirements for unitary status have been met in all relevant respects. Consequently, although the court granted the joint motion in regard to facilities, transportation, and staffing, it denied the motion as it pertained to the areas of student assignment, faculty integration, and extracurricular activities. The district court established new "racial ratios" for the racial composition of students and faculty which it expected to be met no later than October 2012. The court anticipated that if its new orders were followed, it would end its school supervision by October 2015.³

Defendant Shelby County Schools now appeals the portion of the district court order denying the joint motion for unitary status. The intervenor United States appeals the remedy ordered by the district court for faculty integration.⁴

For the reasons stated below, we hold that the district court abused its discretion by denying the parties' joint motion for unitary status regarding student assignment, faculty integration, and extracurricular activities. Accordingly, we reverse, in part, the order of the district court and remand with instructions to grant in full the parties' joint motion for declaration of unitary status, dissolve all outstanding orders and injunctions as to the Board and its members, and dismiss this action as to all parties and claims.

I.

In general, "`[t]he acceptance of a settlement in a class action suit is discretionary with the court and will be overturned only by a showing of abuse of discretion.'" Clark Equip. Co. v. Int'l Union, Allied Indus. Workers of Am., AFL-CIO, 803 F.2d 878, 880 (6th Cir.1986) (quoting Laskey v. UAW, 638 F.2d 954, 957 (6th Cir.1981)). See also Fidel v. Farley, 534 F.3d 508, 513 (6th Cir.2008) ("We review a district court's approval of a settlement as fair, adequate, and reasonable for abuse of discretion.") (citation omitted).

In the specific setting of a school desegregation class action, "[w]here the relief sought in the district court is the dissolution of a[] [desegregation decree], the order of the district court is subject to a mixed standard of review." Manning ex rel. Manning v. School Bd. of Hillsborough County, 244 F.3d 927, 940 (11th Cir. 2001). We review the district court's partial denial of the parties' joint motion to dissolve the desegregation decree for an abuse of discretion. Id. (citation omitted); see also Little Rock Sch. Dist. v. Pulaski County Special Sch. Dist. No. 1, 921 F.2d 1371, 1391 (8th Cir.1990) (reviewing district court's rejection of settlement plan in school desegregation case for abuse of discretion); Armstrong v. Bd. of School Directors of City of Milwaukee, 616 F.2d 305, 319 (7th Cir.1980), overruled in part on other grounds by Felzen v. Andreas, 134 F.3d 873 (7th Cir.1998) (holding that the abuse of discretion standard "is not reserved only for purely economic [class action] litigation" and thus "will govern our review of the district court's approval of the [desegregation] settlement proposal.").

The district court's application of the law is subject to de novo review, while the court's factual findings, including its determination that a school district has not achieved unitary status, fall under the clearly erroneous standard of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a). Manning, 244 F.3d at 940 (citations omitted); Holton v. City of Thomasville School Dist., 425 F.3d 1325, 1336 (11th Cir.2005) (citations omitted). "Courts of appeals view the facts in the light most favorable to the settlement." Armstrong, 616 F.2d at 315 (citation omitted).

II.

The procedural history of this class action, which is set forth in detail in the district court's order addressing the parties' joint motion for a declaration of unitary status, reflects four decades of slow but steady progress in the removal of all vestiges of state-imposed public school segregation. The present-day posture of the case finds the parties at a new crossroads — facing the rare and atypical situation in which a district court has rejected, in part, a reasonable and good-faith joint motion by plaintiffs and defendant to declare a school system unitary. See Wendy Parker, The Decline of Judicial Decisionmaking: School Desegregation and District Court Judges, 81 N.C.L.REV. 1623, 1636-37 nn. 76-80 (2003) (symposium) (collecting cases in which joint motions for unitary status were approved).

In applying the abuse-of-discretion review standard to these uncommon circumstances, we acknowledge as a preliminary matter that a district court's "familiarity with the litigants and the litigation [in a long-standing desegregation suit] is a valuable asset which should not lightly be discarded." Armstrong, 616 F.2d at 319. Nonetheless, it is also well-established that "[p]ublic policy strongly favors settlement of disputes without litigation. ... Settlement agreements should therefore be upheld whenever equitable and policy considerations so permit." Ford Motor Co. v. Mustangs Unlimited, Inc., 487 F.3d 465, 469 (6th Cir.2007) (quoting Aro Corp. v. Allied Witan Co., 531 F.2d 1368, 1372 (6th Cir.1976)). See also Gen. Motors Corp., 497 F.3d at 632 (noting "the federal policy favoring settlement of class actions") (citation omitted). This policy applies equally to desegregation cases. See Little Rock Sch. Dist., 921 F.2d at 1388 (noting that "[a] strong public policy favors agreements, and courts should approach them with a presumption in their favor" in ordering the district court to approve a desegregation settlement plan.).

The voluntary settlement of school desegregation controversies is to be encouraged, even though such litigation implicates the important civil rights of the plaintiff class:

[D]espite the importance of the substantive rights of the class members, settlement is an appropriate method of arriving at a school desegregation remedy. While courts should be extremely sensitive to the possibilities for abuse where a compromise of the civil rights of a class is proposed, a blanket prohibition of compromise could result, in many cases, in abandonment of the substantial benefits which can result from voluntary resolution of litigation, without a commensurate increase in the protection accorded the civil rights of the class. Indeed, it appears that school desegregation is one of the areas in which voluntary resolution is preferable to full litigation because the spirit of cooperation inherent in good faith settlement is essential to the true long-range success of any desegregation remedy. A remedial decree reached through agreement between the parties may, because of the community cooperation it inspires, more effectively implement the constitutional guarantee of equal protection than a seemingly more stringent court-ordered remedy which the community views as imposed upon it from the outside.

Armstrong, 616 F.2d at 317-18 (internal citations omitted).

In Armstrong, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals applied the abuse-of-discretion standard in affirming the district court's approval of a settlement agreement terminating a public school desegregation class action. We find its extensive analysis to be instructive. The Armstrong court held correctly that even "a school desegregation plan devised through voluntary means ... must attain a certain minimum level of constitutional compliance." Id. at 319 (citing Liddell v. Caldwell, 546 F.2d 768 (8th Cir.1976)). Consequently, when a proposed settlement is on the table,

[a] federal court cannot permit an agreement between counsel for the defendants and counsel for the plaintiff class seriously to undercut the constitutional policy requiring desegregation of our nation's schools; this is true even where the class members themselves do not oppose a...