LSAT 151, Section 1, RC Passage 1, Shelley v Kramer

RC Passage 1 Explanation

PASSAGE TEXT: The United States Supreme Court's 1948 ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer famously disallowed …

Paragraph Summaries

1. Shelley v. Kraemer stopped courts from enforcing racially restrictive housing covenants. The result was important and just, but the legal reasoning behind the decision has caused problems.
2. The Court used the Fourteenth Amendment, which applies to state action, not private action. It reasoned that when courts enforce a private contract, the state becomes responsible for the contract’s content.
3. That reasoning threatened to erase the line between private action and state action. Later courts didn’t really follow Shelley’s logic, since courts often enforce private agreements that the government itself couldn’t impose as laws.
4. The Shelley Court also wrongly treated racially restrictive covenants as legal in themselves. The real problem was the racist content of the covenants, not just their enforcement.

Analysis

The author isn’t criticizing the result in Shelley. The author thinks it was good that courts stopped enforcing racially restrictive covenants. So don’t get baited into answers that make the author sound hostile to the decision as a civil-rights victory.

The problem is the rationale. The Fourteenth Amendment needs state action. Private racist contracts are private action. So the Court had to find the “state” somewhere, and it found it in judicial enforcement: if a court enforces the contract, then the state is somehow responsible for the contract’s substance.

That move is way too broad. If taken seriously, almost any private contract you might later ask a court to enforce would have to satisfy constitutional standards. But that isn’t how contract law works. The settlement-agreement example is there to show this: courts enforce private speech restrictions even though the government couldn’t pass the same restriction as a statute.

The word “attribution” is doing the work. Shelley attributes the content of the private agreement to the state because a state court enforces it. The author thinks that attribution creates a mess.

The final paragraph adds a different criticism. Shelley’s logic says the covenants themselves were legal; only court enforcement was unconstitutional. The author finds that ugly. The racist substance was the real problem, and the Court’s reasoning missed that.

Most of the questions are probably testing this split: the author approves of the anti-discrimination result but questions the legal explanation. Any answer that collapses those two things is likely wrong.