Shelley v. Kraemer

Agreements that restrict land use are common and usually legal. The Shelleys argued, however, that a racially biased restrictive covenant violated their right to equal protection under law, guaranteed at the state level by the Fourteenth Amendment. Whereas most such covenants seek to restrict land use, the covenant in question unconstitutionally sought to bar certain races of people.

Segregation in housing was at one time enforced by municipal zoning laws. After the Court declared such laws unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley (1917), property holders turned to private agreements as a means of enforcing housing segregation. At the time that Shelley was brought before the courts, such agreements were being routinely enforced in the North and had begun spreading to the rest of the country.

In reaching its decision, the Court split some fine legal hairs. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Vinson declared that the St. Louis restrictive covenant was a private agreement, and therefore the Court had no power to prohibit it. What had been ruled out in Buchanan were restrictions imposed by the state, and such "state action" was clearly unconstitutional. Judicial enforcement of private restrictive covenants was not state action, but when the covenants were themselves unconstitutional, the courts were prohibited from putting them into effect:

These are not cases . . . in which the States have merely abstained from action, leaving private individuals free to impose such discrimination as they see fit. Rather, these are cases in which the States have made available to such individuals the full coercive power of government to deny to petitioners, on the grounds of race or color, the enjoyment of property rights in premises which petitioners are willing and financially able to acquire and which the grantors are willing to sell. The difference between judicial enforcement and nonenforcement of the restrictive covenants is the difference to petitioners between being denied rights of property available to other members of the community and being accorded full enjoyment of those rights on an equal footing.

The Shelley Court paid scant attention to the sociological data supplied by the parties. It also paid little attention to the fact that there was evidence that the courts that had been enforcing discriminatory restrictive covenants had been themselves adopting segregationist policies. The whole argument of the Court's opinion rather disingenuously failed to note that at a certain point judicial enforcement of private agreements becomes indistinguishable from state action. Still, the impact of Shelley v. Kraemer was undeniable. Suddenly, discrimination in housing was a serious issue with constitutional implications. The decision both discouraged future discriminatory restrictive covenants and encouraged those engaged in the civil rights movement to expand their struggle.