1. Legal representation. The difficulty busing dissenters face in obtaining legal representation is extreme. It is illustrated by their absence as parties from all the major cases relied upon by busing advocates, such as Green, Swann and Crawford I. Of the many "desegregation" cases throughout the country, I could find only two — Johnson and Bustop — in which dissenters were able to muster legal representation approaching that needed to effectively assert their opposition to busing. I say "approaching" because a reading of those cases shows the limitations upon such representation both as to length and scope, contrasted to that available to the other parties — the plaintiffs and the defendant school boards — who combined in those cases to try to stop intervention.

In Johnson, the counsel for a group of Chinese-Americans were forced to go the Ninth Circuit before gaining an opportunity to present their particular objections to a busing plan for San Francisco students in federal trial court. Similarly, counsel for a nonprofit corporation, Bustop, Inc., whose members were mostly white parents opposed to mandatory busing of students, faced opposition all the way to the California District Court of Appeal before they were able to present their objections to the busing plans being considered by Judge Egly. See Johnson v. San Francisco Unified School District 500 F. 2d 349, (9th Cir. 1974); also Bustop v. Superior Court, 69 C.A. 3d 66 (1977).

Ideally, dissenting students should have court-appointed friend-of-court representation throughout legal proceedings in which it becomes clear that they are real parties in interest by reason of busing plans targeted at them. Otherwise, their right to be heard on the same level as the busing advocates is lost by the assumption of ultimate authority by a court over a school district, and the horrendous burden of obtaining counsel to formally assert their rights because of the futility of asserting them to the school board.

Practically, the only solution for busing dissenters in places whose school boards will not act, in seeking to gain relief from a long-time busing order, may be by pro bono representation. For the financial inability of such parents and students to retain counsel to gain such relief in some 200 cases reportedly under court control throughout the country is so clear as to call for judicial notice of that fact. The Carlin Court did