Rarely has a state supreme court decision received such extensive publicity and public comment as the recent California Supreme Court opinion in Serrano v. Priest,l concerning the constitutionality of interdistrict disparities in financing California public school districts. Indeed, one might have to go back to the United States Supreme Court reapportionment cases to find a decision of any court that has been as extensively discussed in the press as has Serrano. Most significantly, the press comment seems to have been uniformly affirmative. The Serrano result has been popularly hailed as rightly egalitarian and a significant, if not the significant, step in the struggle for better education in urban areas.2 Even those editorial writers who have traditionally been proponents of judicial restraint have refrained from commenting adversely upon the court's decision invalidating California's public school financing system. In part this absence of adverse comment may be attributable to the fact that it was the California Supreme Court and not the United States Supreme Court that decided the case. Yet, the decision's impact is clearly not confined to California. The California school finance system is similar in effect to the systems used in 49 of the 50 states,3 and the court avowedly rested its decision on federal equal protection grounds.4 It has also been expressly followed by a federal district court