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Cooper v. Aaron (1958)

Citation: 358 U.S. 1 (1958) Court: Supreme Court of the United States Author: Opinion jointly signed by all nine justices — the only such opinion in Supreme Court history. Chief Justice Earl Warren presided; the opinion was a collective work product.

Parties

William G. Cooper — president of the Little Rock, Arkansas school board, representing the district that had developed and partially implemented a voluntary integration plan in response to Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

John Aaron — one of the Black children whose parents had sued the Little Rock School Board to enforce the Brown mandate. His name appears on the case caption because his surname came first alphabetically among the plaintiff children. The lead lawyer for the NAACP plaintiffs was Thurgood Marshall, seven years before his own appointment to the Supreme Court.

The immediate background to the case was the September 1957 confrontation at Little Rock Central High School. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine Black students from entering the school under the school board's desegregation plan. President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the federal court order. The students attended Central High School that year under armed federal protection. By early 1958 the school board, citing what it described as intolerable disruption, petitioned the federal district court for a two-and-a-half-year delay in further integration.

Facts

The facts are compressed into a single year of confrontation. In May 1955, one year after Brown v. Board of Education (Brown I) and shortly after Brown II ordered desegregation "with all deliberate speed," the Little Rock School Board adopted a three-phase voluntary integration plan. Phase One called for token integration of Central High School beginning September 1957.

In August 1957, days before school was to begin, Governor Faubus — who had until that point not been publicly opposed to the plan — ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School and bar Black students from entering. His stated justification was that integration would produce violence; federal district Judge Ronald Davies enjoined the Governor's action, finding no credible threat of violence that state law enforcement could not handle. Faubus responded by withdrawing the Guard, leaving Little Rock police in charge; mob violence ensued, and President Eisenhower, under his Article II authority to ensure federal law is executed, federalized the Arkansas National Guard and dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock. The nine Black students attended Central High School for the 1957–1958 academic year under continuous federal military protection. The year was one of sustained harassment of the students — Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, and the seven others known as the Little Rock Nine — by classmates and by outside agitators.

In February 1958 the Little Rock School Board petitioned the federal district court to suspend the integration plan for two and a half years, citing the "intolerable" atmosphere and the disruption to education. The district court granted the delay; the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. The United States Supreme Court, meeting in an unprecedented special summer session in August 1958 (its first since 1953), heard argument on September 11. It issued a brief per curiam order on September 12 affirming the Eighth Circuit's reversal of the delay — so that the school year could begin on schedule — and followed with a full written opinion on September 29, 1958.

Question presented

Whether state governments and state officials may refuse to comply with decisions of the federal judiciary interpreting the United States Constitution.

Holding

No. State governments are bound by decisions of the federal judiciary interpreting the United States Constitution. Arkansas may not, through its Governor or Legislature, refuse to comply with Brown v. Board of Education. The Little Rock School Board's requested delay is denied; the district court's grant of delay is reversed. The decision was unanimous: all nine justices joined the opinion, and — in an unprecedented procedural departure — each justice signed the opinion individually rather than having it issued by the Chief Justice alone.

The individual signatures were a deliberate signal. Chief Justice Warren, writing privately to his colleagues, explained that the unanimous and individually signed form would remove any argument that the decision reflected the views of a particular Chief Justice or a closely divided Court. The signal succeeded; Cooper v. Aaron has been cited thousands of times since 1958, and no Justice has suggested that the decision was incorrectly decided.

Reasoning

The opinion proceeds in three movements: it addresses the immediate question (whether the Little Rock plan can be delayed), it addresses the structural question (whether Arkansas is bound by Brown), and it states the rule of constitutional supremacy as a general proposition.

First, the immediate question. The Court held that even genuinely disruptive conditions cannot delay compliance with a federal constitutional order, when the disruption is caused by state officials refusing to comply. The school board had argued that its situation was uniquely difficult because the Governor was actively working against it; the Court's response was that constitutional rights cannot be suspended because state officials are creating the conditions that make them harder to enforce. If they could, a sufficiently hostile state apparatus would be able to suspend any federal constitutional right indefinitely. The Court framed this in explicit terms: the rights of Black children to attend desegregated schools "can neither be nullified openly and directly by state legislators or state executive or judicial officers, nor nullified indirectly by them through evasive schemes for segregation" (358 U.S. at 17).

Second, the structural question. The Arkansas Governor and Legislature had taken the position that they were not bound by Brown v. Board of Education because Arkansas had not been a party to that case and because, in their view, the decision was legally erroneous and could be disregarded by state officials operating in good faith. The Court rejected this argument directly and at length. At 358 U.S. at 18 the opinion cites Marbury v. Madison: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." The Court continued: "This decision declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system."

The Marbury citation was deliberate. Marbury v. Madison had established the Supreme Court's authority to interpret the Constitution and to invalidate legislation that conflicted with it; Cooper extended that authority to state officials, holding that state governments are bound by the federal judiciary's constitutional interpretations in the same way the federal legislative and executive branches are. The logic was structural: if state officials could decline to comply with federal constitutional decisions they considered incorrect, there would be as many constitutions as there are states, and the Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) would be a dead letter.

Third, the general rule. The Court articulated the principle of constitutional supremacy as a proposition binding on every American governmental officer. At 358 U.S. at 19 the opinion invokes the officeholder oath of Article VI, Clause 3: state officers, like federal officers, are "bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution." The oath is not a pledge to support the Constitution as each officer understands it; it is a pledge to support the Constitution as the federal judiciary has construed it. An officer who takes the oath and then refuses to comply with a federal constitutional order has violated the oath's binding content.

Significance

Cooper v. Aaron is the direct doctrinal companion to Brown v. Board of Education. Brown held that segregation in public education violated the Equal Protection Clause. Cooper held that state governments could not evade Brown by refusing to comply with it. Without Cooper, Brown would have been (in the words of Herbert Wechsler's 1959 Harvard Law Review article) a "paper promise," enforceable only through repeated federal intervention in every individual school district. With Cooper, Brown became a binding constitutional rule that state officials were oath-bound to implement.

The broader significance is the combination of Marbury and Cooper together. Marbury established that federal courts could invalidate legislation as unconstitutional. Cooper established that state governments could not decline to comply with federal constitutional interpretations. Together the two cases define the American system in which the Supreme Court has the final word on the Constitution's meaning, binding on the political branches at all levels of government. The system is distinctive — most countries with written constitutions have different arrangements — and it is anchored in these two decisions.

Cooper has been cited in every major case involving state defiance of federal constitutional interpretation in the seventy years since 1958. Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), cited Cooper for the proposition that state officials must comply with federal judicial orders. Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), invoked Cooper in the context of state-official duties after the Court recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Judges refusing to perform such marriages cited state-level conscience protections; the Cooper framework — that state officials are bound by federal constitutional decisions — was the structural response.

The procedural unanimity of Cooper remains unique. The Supreme Court's opinion-by-opinion signature pattern — each Justice signing individually rather than having the Court's opinion issued by a single author — has not been repeated. The form was a deliberate communication: when the basic architecture of the American system was at stake, the Court spoke not through its Chief Justice but as nine individuals unanimously.

Dissent

There was none. The Court's unanimous posture was a central feature of the opinion's force and was the product of Warren's specific effort, detailed in Warren's memoirs and in Bernard Schwartz's Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court (NYU Press, 1983). Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote a separate concurrence addressing what he saw as issues of federal-state judicial relations; the concurrence was not a disagreement with the majority opinion but an elaboration of one specific point.

Later citations

Sources

Full citations in sources/citation_index.md under Cooper v. Aaron.