Reading Comprehension

PT151 · S1 · P1 · Q6 The Shelley Court

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The United States Supreme Court’s 1948 ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer famously disallowed state courts from enforcing racially restrictive covenants.

Topic

The U.S. Supreme Court's 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer, which barred state courts from enforcing racially restrictive housing covenants, and the legal rationale the Court used to reach that result.

Framework

Highlight Noteworthy (with critique). The author concedes the outcome is "justly celebrated" but argues that the legal reasoning behind it is flawed.

Main Point

The Shelley outcome was right, but the Court's "attribution" rationale was problematic — it would have collapsed the line between state action and private action, courts have refused to follow it since, and worst of all it left untouched the real evil of racially restrictive covenants by treating the covenants themselves as legal. Most Valuable Sentence:

P1: Setting up the critique

Introduces Shelley, defines racially restrictive covenants, and notes the decision is rightly celebrated for ending their judicial enforcement. Pivot at the end: even so, the legal rationale is problematic.

P2: The Court's rationale

The Fourteenth Amendment applies to states, not private individuals. The covenants were private contracts, but the Court found state action in the act of judicial enforcement: Under this "attribution" logic, courts can enforce only those contractual provisions that could have been enacted as general law.

P3: Why the rationale collapses the state/private line

If applied consistently, the attribution rationale would force individuals to conform private agreements to constitutional standards anytime they wanted them enforceable — erasing the state-action/private-action distinction. The Supreme Court and lower courts have not followed it; they routinely enforce private contracts (e.g., settlement non-disclosure agreements) whose terms could not have been enacted as general law.

Which one of the following principles is most clearly operative in the author’s argument?

If a judicial decision is
If-Conclusion
The conclusion is "the judicial rationale is problematic", so it needs to be on the right side of the arrow. Any time you start an answer choice, "If [Conclusion] ... ", it's wrong. Also, "problematic judicial decision" isn't even a great match for "problematic legal rationale". The author is happy about the decision but not a fan of the stated rationale.
6% picked this
If a private agreement is
Bad Conclusion Match
The author is never arguing that the substantive content of a private agreement should be considered for inclusion in a statute, so this principle will do nothing to support her argument. The author is arguing that the substantive content of private restrictive covenant agreements should have been chastised by the Court for being inherently racist/problematic.
13% picked this
If a judicial decision fails
Bad Conclusion Match
If the 2nd half of this answer said, "then the legal rationale for the decision is problematic", we'd love it. Instead, the second half of the principle goes into Out of Scope territory. The Shelley decision failed to address the most troubling aspect of restrictive covenants, their inherent racism. This answer is acting like the author advocated that we should take measures to prevent inherent racism from continuing in an altered form, but none of that was mentioned.
24% picked this
Correct
If courts are hesitant to
Why this is right
We were told in the 3rd paragraph that courts are hesitant to apply the attribution logic, post - Shelley. This is where the author is making her case against Shelley's stated legal rationale. Were to consistently to apply it, it would make individual agreements have to conform to Constitutional standards. Since that's unrealistic, neither the Supreme Court nor lower courts have used Shelley's logic again. And the second half of this answer choice is a good match for the author's conclusion: "the stated rationale is problematic"
Skill tested: Principle · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
51% picked this
If the rationale given in
Bad Conclusion Match
We can probably support that the Shelley rationale is controversial, or at least not-embraced, since we know that the Supreme Court and lower courts have not gone back to re-use that rationale, post -Shelley. But, the author never recommends that the decision should be supported by offering a new rationale. We might assume that is her position, since she is writing a passage expressing displeasure with the existing rationale. But one can write an article saying "The Seahawks shouldn't have passed on 2nd and Goal at the 1 yard line", and that doesn't mean we're agitating for the Superbowl to be replayed. You can just criticize something without ordering a redo. Since our author never asked for a redo, we can't match this to her explicit conclusion (the stated rationale was problematic).
6% picked this

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