The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday issued a 5-4 ruling against voluntary-integration plans in K-12 public-school districts in Louisville, Ky. and Seattle, Wash. that use race as a factor to prevent segregation in student assignments. These cases were among the most publicly watched of the court's 2006-2007 term and were the final decisions the court rendered before taking recess until Oct. 1.

In a fiery 185-page opinion with caustic attacks on each other, the justices reversed lower rulings that upheld the schools' plans, declaring "racial classifications" in student assignments to be inherently unconstitutional.

In April, DiversityInc brought together 13 of the nation's foremost affirmative-action authorities to debate school integration and other issues. They talked about the business case for diversity and the critically formulative role of diversity in early experience and education, which provides exposure to diverse viewpoints that encourages creativity and cooperation and respect. Read the digital edition online now.

Today's Opinion: What Did the Justices Say?

Passionate debate so divided the court that the final opinion, which nearly doubles the length of most Supreme Court opinions, included six separate opinions.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote for the majority, which included Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who also filed a separate concurrence.

The majority opinion was based on the interpretation that the plans weren't narrowly tailored enough--a legal concept invoked by the 2003 case that upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School--to justify race as a factor in school assignments.

Writing for the majority, Roberts wrote: "The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen--discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments."

Moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was the anticipated swing vote in today's decision, agreed that the plans weren't narrowly tailored enough to be constitutional.

"Crude measures of this sort threaten to reduce children to racial chits valued and traded according to one school's supply and another's demand," he wrote.

However, he left the door open for schools to continue using race as a factor in admissions under carefully defined legal limits.

"The decision today should not prevent school districts from continuing the important work of bringing together students of different racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds," wrote Kennedy. "My views do not allow me to join the balance of the opinion by the Chief Justice, which seems to me to be inconsistent in both its approach and its implications with the history, meaning, and reach of the Equal Protection Clause."

At the heart of the court's divisiveness on today's ruling is disagreement over the meaning of Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that the "separate but equal" doctrine upheld in an earlier Supreme Court case was unconstitutional. The majority opinion makes no distinction between segregation and integration under the law.

In an extraordinarily literal interpretation of this landmark ruling, Roberts said that the purpose of Brown was to avoid segregation on the basis of race, not to compensate for inequities in public facilities, and that government segregation of students by race violates the Constitution's promise of equal protection in the 14th amendment.

The four dissenting justices--John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, interpreted Brown differently. "The plurality plays inadequate attention to this law, to past opinions' rationales, their language and the contexts in which they arise. As a result, it reverses course and reaches the wrong conclusion," wrote Breyer, who authored the dissent. "In doing so, it distorts precedent, it misapplies the relevant constitutional principles, it announces legal rules that will obstruct efforts by state and local governments to effectively deal with the growing re-segregation of public schools ... and it undermines Brown's promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality. This cannot be justified in the name of the Equal Protection Clause."

In a separate opinion that concurred with the dissent, Stevens wrote, ""There is a cruel irony in the Chief Justice's reliance on our decision in Brown v. Board of Education ... The Chief Justice fails to note that it was only black schoolchildren who were so ordered; indeed the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways, the Chief Justice rewrites the history of one of this Court's most important decisions."

"To make race matter now so that it might not matter later may entrench the very prejudices we seek to overcome," wrote Kennedy, explaining his concurrence.

An extensive and growing body of research tells us that integration benefits a student body in many ways--by reducing prejudice through exposure, encouraging creativity and improving achievement for traditionally underrepresented students. An exhaustive study of more than 18 million students in 22,000 schools across the country recently found that blacks and Latinos learn more in integrated schools and students of color attending integrated schools perform better in college and the work force, among other findings. Read the full report.

Read the full opinions here.

What Will Happen Next?

"Lower courts look to Supreme Court language for guidance on the question of voluntary affirmative action and diversity efforts in the workplace because diversity efforts in the workplace are not compelled like affirmative action sometimes is," says Gilbert Casellas, former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair and an attorney with Mintz Levin and monthly columnist for DiversityInc. "Diversity professionals will look to this opinion and study it very carefully for some guidance as to whether their voluntary efforts to increase diversity in order to respond to a global economy and to a war for talent [are constitutional]."