Interested parties and supposedly disinterested pundits have taken to predicting what will become of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s most important swing decisions after her retirement. In the 2003-04 term, notably, O’Connor provided the fifth vote to uphold affirmative action programs at public universities – on certain conditions. As we saw in Bolling v. Sharpe, the District of Columbia is an important supporting actor in the development of discrimination law in this country. Twenty years after Bolling‘s progressive milestone, the conservative Supreme Court of the 1970s used another Washington case to limit, rather than expand, discrimination claims in a way that resonates even in the recent affirmative action cases.