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Fourteenth Amendment

Selected Works

Affirmative Action

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Full-Text Articles in Education Law

Embracing Race-Conscious College Admissions Programs: How Fisher V. University Of Texas At Austin Redefines "Affirmative Action" As A Holistic Approach To Admissions That Ensures Equal, Not Preferential, Treatment, Nancy L. Zisk Jun 2019

Embracing Race-Conscious College Admissions Programs: How Fisher V. University Of Texas At Austin Redefines "Affirmative Action" As A Holistic Approach To Admissions That Ensures Equal, Not Preferential, Treatment, Nancy L. Zisk

Nancy L. Zisk

In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the United States Supreme Court affirmed well-established Supreme Court doctrine that race may be considered when a college or university decides whom to admit and whom to reject, as long as the consideration of race is part of a narrowly tailored holistic consideration of an applicant's many distinguishing features. The Court's latest decision heralds a new way of thinking about holistic race-conscious admissions programs. Rather than considering them as "affirmative action" plans that prefer any one applicant to the disadvantage of another, they should be viewed as the Court has described …


Racial Indirection, Yuvraj Joshi Apr 2019

Racial Indirection, Yuvraj Joshi

Yuvraj Joshi

Racial indirection describes practices that produce racially disproportionate results without the overt use of race. This Article demonstrates how racial indirection has allowed — and may continue to allow — efforts to desegregate America’s universities. By analyzing the Supreme Court’s affirmative action cases, the Article shows how specific features of affirmative action doctrine have required and incentivized racial indirection, and how these same features have helped sustain the constitutionality of affirmative action to this point. There is a basic constitutional principle that emerges from these cases: so long as the end is constitutionally permissible, the less direct the reliance on …