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Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren Lenard Hutchinson
Preventing Balkanization Or Facilitating Racial Domination: A Critique Of The New Equal Protection, Darren Lenard Hutchinson
UF Law Faculty Publications
The Supreme Court requires that equal protection plaintiffs prove defendants acted with discriminatory intent. The intent rule has insulated from judicial invalidation numerous policies that harmfully impact racial and ethnic minorities. Court doctrine also mandates that state actors generally remain colorblind. The colorblindness doctrine has led to the judicial invalidation of policies designed to ameliorate the conditions of racial inequality. Taken together, these two equality doctrines facilitate racial domination. The Court justifies this outcome on the ground that the Constitution does not protect “group rights.”
Constitutional law theorists have criticized these aspects of equal protection doctrine. Recently, however, some theorists …
Diversity: The Red Herring Of Equal Protection, Sharon E. Rush
Diversity: The Red Herring Of Equal Protection, Sharon E. Rush
UF Law Faculty Publications
Couching the constitutional inquiry in cases like Bakke and VMI in the context of integration also puts in perspective the diversity justification. Affirmative action policies are constitutional because they integrate state programs. Integration on the basis of race and sex also diversifies state programs. In contrast, attempts to justify sex-segregation in state programs by arguing the policy promotes diversity is irrelevant to an equal protection analysis. Voluntarily created all-female schools should be constitutional because they promote the equal citizenship of women without damaging the equal citizenship stature of men. This is true for voluntarily race-segregated programs for minorities; as well. …