In rejecting two race-conscious school assignment plans, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to those school districts, but also to two prominent conservative jurists who had invited the high court to take a more permissive approach to measures designed to foster racial integration.

Snubbed by the justices were a judge on the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, Michael Boudin, and another from the 9th Circuit, Alex Kozinski, both of whom argued that race-based measures to foster integration in public schools should be considered less problematic than other forms of affirmative action.

Justice Thomas, who voted to strike down the integration plans, delivered the most direct rebuke to the two jurists, calling their arguments “inimical to the Constitution and to this Court’s precedents.” In the main dissent, Justice Breyer approvingly mentioned the opinions of both Judges Boudin and Kozinski, but ultimately shied away from their conceptual framework. A separate dissent by Justice Stevens was perhaps the most generous to the pair, referring to them as “two of our wisest federal judges.”

Judge Boudin, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, stepped out with his contrarian view in 2005, in response to a suit against the student assignment plan used in Lynn, Mass. “The Lynn plan is far from the evils at which the Fourteenth Amendment was addressed,” Judge Boudin wrote. “The way the Lynn plan uses race is certainly more benign that laws that favor or disfavor one race, segregate by race or create quotas for or against a racial group.”

Soon thereafter, Judge Kozinski weighed in with a similar view, arguing for the constitutionality of Seattle’s plan, which was shot down last week by the Supreme Court. He said the Seattle plan carried few of the obvious drawbacks found in practices the courts have endorsed, such as race-based voting districts and racial preferences in higher education. “There is no attempt to give members of particular races political power based on skin color. There is no competition between the races and no race is given a preference over another,” Judge Kozinski wrote in analyzing the Seattle case. “That a student is denied the school of his choice may be disappointing, but it carries no racial stigma and says nothing at all about that individual’s aptitude or ability.”

“That argument didn’t really get any traction at all,” a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Goodwin Liu, observed. “I thought that was a crucial difference between this case and past cases.”

In his concurring opinion last week, Justice Thomas flatly rejected the notion that the school assignment plans were benign because no merit-based system was being disturbed. He noted that some parents got notices that their children were denied assignment to the school of their choice on account of their race.” This type of exclusion, solely on the basis of race, is precisely the sort of government action that pits the races against one another,” the justice wrote.

The swing vote striking down the Seattle plan and another from Louisville, Ky., came from Justice Kennedy, who said school boards could take racial demographics into account when drawing school attendance zones, siting schools, and recruiting faculty, but not when assigning individual students.

Justice Kennedy’s suggestions immediately became the guideposts for school systems looking to craft new ways to achieve racial balance. Yet those proposals are more blunt than direct consideration of race and arguably cause more collateral damage. A nominally race-blind plan Texas adopted in 1997 to have state colleges admit the top 10% of students from local high schools ended up pulling in fewer minorities than anticipated and burdening colleges with more unprepared students than traditional affirmative action.

“The choice is between openly using race as a criterion or concealing it through some clumsier proxy device,”Judge Boudin wrote in his 2005 opinion.

A kind of duplicity has pervaded race-related measures in education ever since Justice Powell’s 1978 opinion in Bakke eschewing quotas but accepting race as a factor in college admissions. “Lots of the noxious, corrosive flavor of the affirmative action debate is due to this obfuscation,” Mr. Liu said. “A lot of people who oppose affirmative action and are aggrieved about it view what universities do not only as wrong, but also dishonest, which makes it worse.”

Teetering on Justice Kennedy’s vote, the court has again endorsed an awkward compromise that lauds policy-makers who obscure what they’re up to and punishes those who are most direct.