A desegregation suit had already been withdrawn from Federal court, after the United States Supreme Court made it clear in a case involving Detroit that desegregation orders could not include suburbs unless the segregation had been intentional.
Then in mid-decade, the Hartford group aborted its own suit, on the eve of filing, because the city's minority groups weren't behind it. ''People in the communities of color had become disenchanted with school desegregation,'' Mr. Brittain said.
In addition, he said, the fastest growing minority group in Hartford was Puerto Ricans, who were more interested in bilingual and bicultural education than integration.
At about that time, however, the Hartford lawyers joined forces with the Legal Defense Fund, which was looking for new strategies to attack urban poverty. Lawyers were studying state constitutions like Connecticut's, which specifies education as a fundamental right.
School-finance suits in Connecticut, New Jersey and other states had relied on that right to win more state aid for poor urban districts. Now lawyers theorized that the right translated into a guaranteed level of education.
In the late 80's, in a general effort to improve public schools, states began providing such standards by developing minimum requirements for students. Connecticut imposed statewide mastery tests, and it reported the results district by district. Hartford ranked last, despite spending as much or more per pupil as most of its suburbs.
''It really came as a wake-up call,'' said Martha Stone, the legal director of the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union until last year. ''I don't think there had been an understanding of how badly children in Hartford were doing.''
The final impetus for the suit, in 1988, again came from the state: a report describing the growing racial isolation of children in all of Connecticut's cities, and their low academic achievement.
In 1989, the Legal Defense Fund endorsed filing suit, in large part on the strength of an unusual provision in Connecticut's constitution that bars not only racial discrimination, but racial segregation.
At trial, the Sheff plaintiffs lost in 1995. Judge Harry Hammer of the Superior Court ruled that the state was not responsible for the racial isolation.
But in July, a 4-3 majority on the State Supreme Court reversed Judge Hammer, declaring that racial and ethnic segregation is deeply harmful to education, violating the state constitution's guarantees of equal opportunity.
The court ordered the Legislature to find a remedy, without setting goals for racial balance between Hartford, where 95 percent of the 24,000 students are black or Hispanic, and its suburbs.
Critics accuse the Connecticut court of distorting the state's Constitution to reach its decision. One of the sharpest critiques came from three justices on the court, who began their dissent by agreeing on the harm of segregation, the benefits of integration, and ''the importance in our state -- indeed, in our nation -- of finding a way to cross the racial divide.''
But, Justice David M. Borden then wrote, the majority ''has transformed a laudable educational philosophy into a constitutional mandate.''
It used the court's power to interpret the Constitution, he wrote, ''to mandate a vast and unprecedented social experiment, using the state's schools and schoolchildren as test data, and thereby to construct what the majority perceives to be the necessary bridge.''
The ultimate value of the Sheff suit may be in demonstrating how an entire metropolitan area can attack inner-city poverty, if the Legislature succeeds in fashioning a plan to enable city students to attend suburban schools and to attract suburban students into the city.
''This sends a message that you have to conceive of the people of a metropolitan area as being in the same boat, and you can't draw a line around an inner city and say 'Survive or die on your own,' '' said a Legal Defense Fund lawyer, Marianne Lado.