Legal Education Commons^™

Don’T Tell, Don’T Ask: Narrow Tailoring After Grutter And Gratz, Ian Ayres, Sydney Foster

Ian Ayres

The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisions in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger changed the meaning of “narrow tailoring.” While the narrow tailoring requirement has always had multiple dimensions, a central meaning has been that the government must use the smallest racial preference needed to achieve its compelling interest. We might have expected, therefore, that if the Court were to uphold one of the two programs at issue in Grutter and Gratz, it would, all other things being equal, uphold the program with smaller racial preferences. We show, however, that the preferences in the admissions program upheld in Grutter …