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This Day in Legal History: The Little Rock Nine

On September 4, 1957, nine Black teenagers tried to walk into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas—and were turned away at the doors by soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard, deployed by Governor Orval Faubus specifically to keep them out. The image of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine, walking alone through a jeering white mob, became one of the defining photographs of the civil rights era. And the confrontation it began became one of the most important tests of whether the rule of law actually means anything.

The legal backdrop was Brown v. Board of Education, decided three years earlier, in which the Supreme Court held that segregated public schools are unconstitutional. Little Rock had a desegregation plan; the Little Rock Nine were supposed to be its first students. Governor Faubus decided to defy the federal courts, using state troops to block integration. The standoff escalated until President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students into the school—federal soldiers enforcing a federal court order against a state government determined to resist it.

The significance of September 4, 1957 crystallized the following year in the Supreme Court’s decision in Cooper v. Aaron, which arose directly from the Little Rock crisis. There, in an opinion signed personally by all nine justices—a rare show of unanimity—the Court declared that state officials cannot nullify a federal court’s interpretation of the Constitution, and that “the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.” It’s a principle that echoes through so much of what we cover: that a court order is not a suggestion, and that no official, however powerful, gets to decide for himself which parts of the Constitution to obey. It’s also a fitting anniversary for today, because our second story is, at bottom, another chapter in the long, unfinished American argument about race and education.

The Trump administration has taken its mail-in voting fight back to the Supreme Court, filing to have the justices clear away the last judicial obstacle to its executive order. Longtime listeners know this saga well. The order would create a federal list of eligible voters and restrict how the Postal Service delivers ballots. Back in late August, the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket, lifted one of two injunctions—but left the Postal Service piece blocked nationwide. The administration then went to the appeals court to try to clear that remaining block, and now it’s gone straight back to the Supreme Court to finish the job. So the whole thing is back in front of the justices, again on an emergency basis. Here’s what makes this significant and, frankly, uncomfortable. We are now two months out from the November midterms, and the fundamental legal question—whether the president actually has the authority to reshape how Americans vote by mail—still has not been decided on the merits. Everything so far has happened through emergency orders and stays, the “shadow docket,” with no full briefing, no argument, and no written opinion explaining the Court’s reasoning. Election administrators need settled rules to run an election; voters need to know how to cast a ballot. Instead, the rules are being rewritten in real time, in emergency filings, weeks before people vote. The significance is that the Supreme Court is now positioned to shape the mechanics of a national election through its emergency process—and whichever way it rules, doing it this way, this close to the election, on this thin a record, is itself a serious concern for the stability and predictability that election law is supposed to provide. Trump administration takes mail-in ballot fight to US Supreme Court | ReutersNPR · The Hill

Now the biggest legal story of the day: the Treasury Department and the IRS have proposed regulations to strip federal tax-exempt status from private schools and colleges that consider race in admissions, scholarships, or policies. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed it bluntly, saying that schools rebranding race-based preferences as “equitable” or “diversity-enhancing” doesn’t change what he called their discriminatory nature. To understand how significant—and how legally aggressive—this is, you need to know a case called Bob Jones University v. United States. In 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the IRS’s power to deny tax-exempt status to a school that racially discriminated—there, a university that banned interracial dating—on the theory that tax exemption is reserved for organizations that serve a public purpose, and that racial discrimination in education violates fundamental public policy. That doctrine was forged to punish schools that discriminated against Black students. What the administration is doing now is taking that exact doctrine and inverting it: arguing that after the Supreme Court’s 2023 SFFA decision ended race-conscious admissions, it’s race-conscious programs—the ones designed to help underrepresented minorities—that constitute the illegal discrimination violating public policy. So the anti-discrimination tax weapon built to dismantle segregation is being turned against diversity programs. A few crucial caveats: this is a proposed regulation, not a final rule—it goes through notice-and-comment and will absolutely be litigated—and it pointedly exempts schools that select based on religion. The significance is enormous. Tax-exempt status is existential for schools; losing it means donations stop being deductible and the institution owes taxes. We’ve tracked this administration’s campaign against DEI—Harvard, Columbia, William & Mary, the Deloitte settlement—and this is the most powerful lever yet: using the tax code, and a civil-rights-era precedent, to force schools to abandon any consideration of race. Trump moves to strip tax-exempt status from schools that consider race | ReutersWashington Post · CNBC

And finally, a story that should make every lawyer check their firm’s cybersecurity: data from two elite law firms, Quinn Emanuel and McDermott Will & Emery, has been exposed in a wave of cyber breaches hitting the legal industry. Law firms are, in a sense, the perfect target. Think about what they hold: their clients’ most sensitive secrets—merger plans, litigation strategy, trade secrets, personal financial and health information, government investigations. A single big firm is a one-stop shop for confidential data across dozens of major companies and individuals. That makes firms enormously attractive to criminal hackers and nation-state actors alike, and this latest wave—part of a broader surge of attacks on the legal sector—shows the threat is intensifying. Here’s the professional-responsibility dimension, because this isn’t just an IT problem. Lawyers have an ethical duty to protect client confidences—the ABA’s Model Rules require attorneys to make reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorized disclosure of client information, which in the modern world squarely includes cybersecurity. When a firm gets breached, it can face not only regulatory and contractual liability and breach-notification obligations, but also questions about whether it met its ethical duty of competence in safeguarding the data in the first place. The significance is a wake-up call for a profession that runs on confidentiality. As firms rush to adopt powerful new tools—we covered Google bringing Gemini AI into Big Law just last week—they’re accumulating and centralizing ever more sensitive client data, which raises the stakes on protecting it. The duty of confidentiality is as old as the profession; the threat surface is brand new, and growing. Data of law firms Quinn Emanuel, McDermott exposed in cyber breaches | ReutersBloomberg Law · The Record

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