Law Commons^™

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 …

Diversity And The Practice Of Interest Assessment, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

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In Defense Of Deference, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel E. Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

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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 …

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.

Discrimination Cases Of The 2002 Term (Symposium: The Fifteenth Annual Supreme Court Review), Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

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Grutter V. Bollinger: This Generation's Brown V. Board Of Education, Michelle Adams

Articles

At first blush, Grutter appears to be a deviation from the body of the Court's recent affirmative action jurisprudence: it says "yes" where the other cases said "no." But it is not so clear that Grutter is a deviation from current law. Instead, it might be seen as consistent with it, in that the justification for the racial preference recognized in Grutter transcended the justifications offered in the previous cases, and the method used to achieve that end, "race as a factor," diffused rather than highlighted race. From this perspective, Grutter addressed several concerns that had troubled the Court for …

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 …