amici, in their Oklahoma City brief.

In addition, the action by the Supreme Court in the first Dege case, overruling an ancient precedent, taught the value of questioning precedent when the proper time had come. The extraordinary extension of judicial power by the 1976 Crawford Court led to my unusual invocation of the separation of powers provision of the California Constitution and the guarantee clause of the Constitution in the 1980 complaint in intervention in the Carlin case. This laid the groundwork for arguing the separation of powers point by the Carlin intervenors, as amici, in the DeKalb County brief.

To me, another example of the overly long stretch of judicial power was the overruling by a Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals split panel of a district judge whose rulings sanctioned a neighborhood school plan for K-4 students in Oklahoma City schools. Dowell v. Bd. of Educ. of Okl. City Public Schools, (10th Cir. 1989), 890 F.2d 1483. The effect of the Circuit ruling, 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 panel member. Id. at 1540.

However, the school board did challenge the ruling and the Supreme Court granted a hearing on the petition for writ of certiorari. But as is typical in these cases, there was no independent voice in behalf of those Oklahoma City students and their parents who, by reason of their selection of their neighborhood schools, may fairly be said to oppose racial reassignment of said children away from them. Hence, the "anti-busing" intervenors in the Carlin case endeavored to provide a voice for them by way of an amici curiae brief in which points would be made in their behalf similar to some of those raised in the San Diego case.

Two points were made in the friend-of-the-court brief which was mailed to the Clerk of the Supreme Court on May 11, 1990. They were that those young Oklahoma City students were constitutionally protected from (1) being racially discriminated against and (2) having their liberty and privacy impaired, by being judicially reassigned indefinitely to other than their neighborhood elementary schools for racial balance.

The interest of the San Diego student busing dissenters and the summary of their argument in behalf of students similarly situated in