In Porter v. Warner 328 U.S. 395
(1946) the Court seeded on the verge of giving equity a radical
expansion by arguing that when the “public interest is involved
in a proceeding” the equitable powers of the federal district
courts “assume an even broader and more flexible character that when
only a private controversy is at stake.” But it was not until 1955
that it became clear just how fluid equity had become. The Court, in
the second Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas 349
U.S. 294 (1955), fashioned a new understanding of the Court’s
equitable remedial powers. The central thrust was that in the
place of an individual adverse litigant the Court placed an
aggrieved social class. Its remedies would be decreed, no
longer for the individual who had been injured by the generality of
the law, but rather for whole classes of people on the basis of
a deprivation of rights — a deprivation that was provable only by
resort to the uncertain realm of psychological knowledge and
sociological laws unconstitutional and restricting their operation:
it attempted to fashion broad remedies for those so
deprived.
What is particularly striking about Warren's invocation
of the federal equity power in Brown (II) is that, while he spoke of
the “traditional attributes" and guiding “principles" of equity
being controlling, he then ignored most of the more substantial
equitable principles in writing his opinion.