Groundswell Amici Brief
Supports Oklahoma City Counterparts

On March 26, 1990 a hearing was granted the Oklahoma City school board on its petition for certiorari, challenging the overruling by a U.S. Court of Appeals split panel of a district judge whose rulings sanctioned a neighborhood plan for K-4 students in Oklahoma City schools. See Dowell v. Bd. of Educ. of Okl. City Public Schools, (10th Cir.) 890 F.2d 1483.

I had rough drafted an amici brief and studied the Supreme Court rules for filing it during the period awaiting the expected grant of a certiorari hearing. Although I was confident I could get it filed, I knew I would have do so as economically as possible to husband my limited resources, which had been supplemented by “passing the hat” toward expenses by Groundswell parents.

Economies were achieved in a way that will interest sole practitioners who must be similarly resourceful. The drafting of the brief was part of a project in a computer class at Ramona High School. Then, with my son Robert’s help, I completed the brief in final form on his friend’s computer which provided the right type size and spacing required by the applicable rules. These two computer experts then aided me in printing a master copy of the brief, to be duplicated by a commercial printer at less cost than a legal specialty printer.

This effort contrasted with the help I got in preparing briefs on appeal to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals as one of two Assistant U.S. Attorneys manning the San Diego branch office from 1959 to 1964. There, my drafts of the appellate briefs in cases I had tried were later perused by appeal experts in the main Los Angeles office who sent them on to a legal printer. A product was thus finely tuned, served, and filed in accordance with the appellate rules in every respect.

The ruling on appeal in Dowell, if left unchallenged, would have prevented many very young students from attending their neighborhood schools and required busing them elsewhere for racial balance indefinitely, according to the dissenting member of the appellate panel. Id. at 1540.

The opposition of many of such students to such busing is apparent