Desegregation decrees in both the foregoing cities, to echo Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, placed a burden upon innocent children and their parents who were not charged with any offending action. That was the burden — compelling children to leave their neighborhood and spend significant time each day being transported to a distant school — resisted first in Boston and then in Los Angeles. To emphasize, those decrees had derived from stare decisis application of rulings in cases in which their individual interests had not been separately represented.

I concluded there was a necessity for a fuller articulation of constitutional objections to forced busing in behalf of innocent persons subject to it. Weren't these innocent parents and their children subject to such busing the real parties in interest? Weren't they being shut out of individual representation in these desegregation actions directed toward their school board members who, of course, were not so affected by the busing remedy sought? And wasn't the rarity of their separate appearances in the precedential and other actions, directed solely against school authorities, approving such a remedy indicative of their financial inability to gain separate individual representation?

These and other concerns led to my penning a commentary to The San Diego Union on September 18, 1977, titled “Busing, Not Integration, Opposed.” (See Appendix I)
 

San Diego Busing Dissenters
Need  Pro Bono Representation

There was also pending a similarly-derived class action, Carlin v. Board of Education, San Diego Unified School District, in which a class of students and their parents (Carlin Plaintiffs) were seeking the racial balancing of San Diego schools, “if necessary through court order.”

I learned that a San Diego group of parents, called Groundswell, feared their children would be subjected to forced busing following a March 10, 1977 order in the Carlin case. That decree ordered the San Diego Board to take some reasonably feasible steps to alleviate school segregation in certain “minority isolated schools.” Those parents' concern arose because their board seemed to be preparing them for such busing at