I anticipated the Oklahoma City case would reach the Supreme Court where no doubt parents and students there had pressured their board to eliminate the continuing threat of court-ordered student assignments. Why not file an amici brief by the Groundswell dissenters, similarly opposed to such affirmative judicial action, from their point of view? Especially since approval of the U.S. Court of Appeals panel decision there could have an adverse impact here.

Samuel Krislov’s study, The Amicus Curiae Brief: From Friendship to Advocacy, 72 Yale L J 694, at 712 reflects their value:

… Arguments that might anger the justices, doctrines that have not yet been found legally acceptable, and emotive presentations that have little standing can best be utilized by the amicus rather than by principals. The NAACP, for example, suggested the overruling of Plessy v. Ferguson as an amicus curiae in Henderson v. United States. And sometimes such suggestions bear fruit. For example, the ACLU amicus curiae brief was apparently influential in the overturning of Wolf v. Colorado. [Footnotes omitted]

Another example of amici success was the adoption of the affirmative integration theory by the California Supreme Court in Jackson v. Pasadena City School Dist. (1963), 59 Cal.2d 876, at 881, urged only by non-parties in two amici briefs. See Footnote 5 in Note, 51 Cal.L.Rev. 810 (1963).