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[page 106] MISSOURI v. JENKINS

O'CONNOR, J., concurring

300, and contradicted the holding in Milliken, I that remedies
may go beyond the boundaries of the constitutional violator.
Gautreaus, however, does not eliminate the requirement of
Milliken I that such territorial transgression is permissible
only upon a showing that the intradistrict constitutional violation
produced significan interdistrict segregative effects;
if anything, our opinion repeatedly affirmed that principle,
se Gautreaux, supra, at 292-294, 296, n. 12. More importatn
for our purposes here, Gautreaux in no way contravenes
the underlying principle that the scope of desegregation
remedies, even those that are solely intradistrict, is "determined
by the nature and extent of the constitutional violation,"
Milliken I, supra, at 744 (citing Swann v. Charlotte
Mecklenburg Bd. of Ed., 402 U.S. 1, 16 (1971). Gautreaux
simply does not give federal courts a blank check to impose
unlimited remedies upon a constitutional violator.
As an initial mattr, Gautreaux itself may not even have
concerned a case of interdistrict relief, at least not in the
sence that Milliken I and other school desegregation cases
have understood it. Our opinion made clear that the authority
of the Department of Housing and urban Development
(HUD) extends beyond the Chicago city limits, see
Gautreaux, 425 U.S.. at 298-299, n. 14, and that HUD's own
administrative practice treated the Chicago metropolitan area
as an undifferentiated whole, id., at 299. Thus, "[t]he relevant
geographic area for purposes of the respondents' housing
options is the Chicago housing market, not the Chicago
city limits." Ibid. Because the relevant district is the
greater metropolitan area, drawing the remedial line at the
city limits would be "arbitrary and mechanical." id., at 300.
JUSTICE SOUTER, post, at 169-170, makes much of how
HUD phrased the question presented: whether it is appropriate
to grant " 'inter-district relief for discrimination in
public housing in the absence of a finding of an inter-district
violation.' " Gautreaus, supra, at 292. HUD obviously
had an interest in phrasing the question thus, since doing so