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Full-Text Articles in Law
Brown'S Legacy Then And Now: Race And Law School Admissions Debates Continue After Nearly 70 Years, Lauren M. Collins
Brown'S Legacy Then And Now: Race And Law School Admissions Debates Continue After Nearly 70 Years, Lauren M. Collins
Law Faculty Articles and Essays
Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. Although this case represents a major victory in the battle for civil rights, the struggle against racism in education began some 20 years prior to Brown. During the 1930s and 1940s, at least seven African-American law school candidates aggressively challenged the unequal treatment of minority applicants in state courts, some eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. Early successes in these cases lead to the more sweeping Brown decision, which then contributed to further law school admission policy reform. Discussion about the role of …
Introduction To Law, Ethics, And Affirmative Action In America, Joseph P. Tomain
Introduction To Law, Ethics, And Affirmative Action In America, Joseph P. Tomain
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
This article discusses the language of the opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. The rhetoric and language that we use to address race is difficult, if not tortured. The article explains why Grutter should have been an easy case and a simple opinion, and the ways in which the final opinion was anything but simple.
Does Grutter Offer Courts An Opportunity To Consider Race In Jury Selection And Decisions Related To Promoting Fairness In The Deliberation Process?, Phoebe A. Haddon
Does Grutter Offer Courts An Opportunity To Consider Race In Jury Selection And Decisions Related To Promoting Fairness In The Deliberation Process?, Phoebe A. Haddon
Faculty Scholarship
This essay considers whether the two recent Supreme Court affirmative action cases, the Michigan law school and undergraduate cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, provide support for opening the process of jury selection and deliberation to more fully include people of color and other under-represented groups and their experiences. I shall argue that these recent affirmative action cases can provide some support for ensuring better representation of people of color in the jury selection process, challenging the pre-textual use of peremptories and opening opportunities to talk about race during trials. The Court's reasoning in Grutter that diversity is …
Discrimination Cases Of The 2002 Term (Symposium: The Fifteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Eileen Kaufman
Discrimination Cases Of The 2002 Term (Symposium: The Fifteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Eileen Kaufman
Scholarly Works
No abstract provided.
Diversity And The Practice Of Interest Assessment, Robert F. Nagel
Diversity And The Practice Of Interest Assessment, Robert F. Nagel
Publications
No abstract provided.
The Racial Gap In Ability: From The Fifteenth Century To Grutter And Gratz, Kevin D. Brown
The Racial Gap In Ability: From The Fifteenth Century To Grutter And Gratz, Kevin D. Brown
Articles by Maurer Faculty
Justice O'Connor’s opinion for the United States Supreme Court in Grutter v. Bollinger upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action plan. Beneficiaries of affirmative action clearly meet the necessary qualifications for admissions to selective colleges, universities, and graduate programs. But, the justifications for affirmative action articulated by Justice O'Connor implicitly recognized that underrepresented minorities with a history of discrimination are not as academically qualified as their non-Hispanic white (and Asian counterparts). Their inclusion in affirmative action plans is based on the belief that they provide enough educational and non-educational benefits to offset their academic shortcomings.
There are measurable …
What Is Affirmative Action?, John Valery White
What Is Affirmative Action?, John Valery White
Scholarly Works
There is no rigorous definition of affirmative action. This Article argues that this remarkable circumstance has distorted and undercut American antidiscrimination law.
Though affirmative action is vigorously and widely debated, it has not been defined in the rigorous manner legal commentators would normally demand. Rather, commentators have deferred to policymakers' descriptions of affirmative action programs and employed those “definitions” to set the terms of policy debates over the propriety of affirmative action. Typically, commentators take for granted that affirmative action is “discriminatory” and seek to justify its use in certain contexts. This approach is also prominent in the United States …
A Glimpse Behind And Beyond Grutter, Evan H. Caminker
A Glimpse Behind And Beyond Grutter, Evan H. Caminker
Articles
Many people have suggested that the recent battle over affirmative action was a defining moment for the contemporary relevance of Brown v. Board of Education and that it would determine the promise and potential for widespread societal integration. In my remarks, I want to comment upon a couple of comparisons and links between the Brown, Bakke, Grutter, and Gratz cases.
Bolling Alone, Richard A. Primus
Bolling Alone, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Under the doctrine of reverse incorporation, generally identified with the Supreme Court's decision in Bolling v. Sharpe, equal protection binds the federal government even though the Equal Protection Clause by its terms is addressed only to states. Since Bolling, however, the courts have almost never granted relief to litigants claiming unconstitutional racial discrimination by the federal government. Courts have periodically found unconstitutional federal discrimination on nonracial grounds such as sex and alienage, and reverse incorporation has also limited the scope of affirmative action. But in the presumed core area of preventing federal discrimination against racial minorities, Boiling has virtually no …
The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang
The "Inexorable Zero", Bert I. Huang
Faculty Scholarship
[F]ine tuning of the statistics could not have obscured the glaring absence of minority [long-distance] drivers .... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from "the inexorable zero."
The Supreme Court first uttered the phrase "inexorable zero" a quarter-century ago in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, a landmark Title VII case. Ever since, this enigmatic name for a rule of inference has echoed across legal argument about segregation, discrimination, and affirmative action. Justice O'Connor, for instance, cited the "inexorable zero" in a major sex discrimination decision upholding an …
Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique Of The Economics, Civil Liberties, And Constitutional Literature, And Of Criminal Profiling More Generally, Bernard Harcourt
Rethinking Racial Profiling: A Critique Of The Economics, Civil Liberties, And Constitutional Literature, And Of Criminal Profiling More Generally, Bernard Harcourt
Faculty Scholarship
New reporting requirements and data collection efforts by over four hundred law enforcement agencies across the country – including entire states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Washington – are producing a continuous flow of new evidence on highway police searches. For the most part, the data consistently show disproportionate searches of African-American and Hispanic motorists in relation to their estimated representation on the road. Economists, civil liberties advocates, legal and constitutional scholars, political scientists, lawyers, and judges are poring over the new data and reaching, in many cases, quite opposite conclusions about racial profiling.