San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez

San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U. S. 1 (1973), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that San Antonio Independent School District's financing system, which was based on local property taxes, was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. The majority opinion, reversing the District Court, stated that the appellees did not sufficiently prove a textual basis, within the U. S. Constitution, supporting the principle that education is a fundamental right. Urging that the school financing system led to wealth based discrimination, the plaintiffs had argued that the fundamental right to education should be applied to the States, through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court found that there was no such fundamental right and that the unequal school financing system was not subject to strict scrutiny.

In the Supreme Court, a new group of justices had been appointed since the filing of the case. The most significant new member was Justice Lewis Powell, who proved to be the swing vote in the Rodriguez case. Powell led the narrow majority in deciding that the right to be educated (as a child of school age or an uneducated adult), was neither 'explicitly or implicitly' textually found anywhere in the U. S. Constitution. It was therefore, not anywhere protected by the Constitution. He also found that Texas had not created a suspect class related to poverty. The two findings allowed the state to continue its school financing plan as long as it was "rationally related to a legitimate state interest."

Justices Brennan, Douglas, White, and Marshall dissented. In his dissent, Justice Marshall argued that in cases involving unenumerated rights, the Court's "task should be to determine the extent to which constitutionally guaranteed rights are dependent on interests not mentioned in the Constitution," and "[a]s the nexus between the specific constitutional guarantee and the nonconstitutional interest draws closer, the nonconstitutional interest becomes more fundamental and the degree of judicial scrutiny applied when the interest is infringed on a discriminatory basis must be adjusted accordingly."

In a 2015 TIME interview of over 50 legal scholars, University of California, Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Cornell Law Professor Steven Shiffrin both named Rodriguez the "worst Supreme Court decision since 1960," with Chemerinsky noting that the decision has "played a major role in creating the separate and unequal schools that exist today." Partially in response to the Court's ruling in Rodriguez, Justice William Brennan wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review urging lawyers and litigants to turn to their State Supreme Courts — rather than the U. S. Supreme Court — to litigate their constitutional claims, as the conservative Burger Court would likely be unreceptive to claims made by racial minorities, the poor, or other "politically powerless groups whose members have historically been subjected to purposeful discrimination." Since Brennan's article was published, a number of State Supreme Courts have held that substantially unequal public school funding violates their State Constitutions. In April 2020 a three judge panel of the United States Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2–1 in Gary B. v. Whitmer to recognize that children have a US constitutional right to basic literacy education. The panel decision distinguished San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, which did not address the fundamental right to basic education. After an appeal for an en banc review, the case was settled and the panel's precedential decision vacated.