Supreme Court of the United States Commons^™

Is Lawrence Libertarian?, Dale Carpenter

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas is no doubt a shock to those pursuing an antihomosexual agenda. To most Americans, however, the decision is less an ipse dixit announcing radical social change than it is a belated recognition of what they had already learned about the humanity and dignity of gay people. Rather than radically changing constitutional principle, the Court has corrected its own erroneous understanding of the facts that underlay its application of constitutional principle in the past. Rather than leading the nation, the Court has caught up to it.

Part I of this essay lays out …

Grutter And Gratz: A Critical Analysis, Lackland H. Bloom Jr.

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article will analyze the Grutter and Gratz opinions, especially Justice O'Connor's important opinion for the majority in Grutter, and will consider the significance of these decisions in terms of university admissions policy, justifications for racial preferences, and equal protection doctrine. The article will conclude that the Court's defense of the use of racial preferences does not square well with the Powell opinion in Bakke on which it relied so heavily. It will suggest that the Court could have offered a more persuasive explanation for the result it reached but probably felt precluded by precedent from doing so.