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Affirmative Action

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Willful [Color-] Blindness: The Supreme Court's Equal Protection Of Ascription, Aaron J. Shuler Jan 2012

Willful [Color-] Blindness: The Supreme Court's Equal Protection Of Ascription, Aaron J. Shuler

Aaron J Shuler

Rogers Smith in his "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," warns of novel legal systems reconstituting ascriptive American inequality. The post-Warren Courts' approach to Equal Protection, specifically their unwillingness to consider disparate impact and the difference between invidious and benign practices, betrays an "ironic innocence" as described by James Baldwin to a history of racial discrimination and domination, and a disavowal of a hiearchy that the Court perpetuates.


Iqbal & Twobly: Will Plausibility Requirments Influence The Supreme Court's Analysis Of Affirmative Action?, Colin W. Maguire Jan 2012

Iqbal & Twobly: Will Plausibility Requirments Influence The Supreme Court's Analysis Of Affirmative Action?, Colin W. Maguire

Colin W. Maguire

The U.S. Supreme Court seems intent on taking another look at affirmative action in higher education. What could this mean for colleges and universities? This blawg post offers no definitive answers, but points out that arguments exists for both sides of the issue through a recent legal development: Iqbal & Twobly's Plausibility Doctrine. If the Doctrine forces a transative duty on case law, then affirmative action programs' legal rationale - long decried for not making logical sense - could suffer. Conversely, the Court appears to have already used plausibility as a factor in promoting a different type of affirmative action …


Personae Non Suspect: Sexual Orientation Discrimination Under The Supreme Court’S New Anticlassification Regime, Chris R. Copeland Jan 2011

Personae Non Suspect: Sexual Orientation Discrimination Under The Supreme Court’S New Anticlassification Regime, Chris R. Copeland

Chris R Copeland

As Perry v. Schwarzenegger seemingly makes its way to the Supreme Court, LGBT advocates are staking their legal claims around the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause – arguing for the designation of LGBTs as a suspect or quasi-suspect group. The desire for suspect class designation is in vain though. In the late 1970s, the Supreme Court closed the set of suspect and quasi-classifications, and the set will likely remain closed. Around the same time, the Court faced a series of affirmative action cases in which it was forced to choose between two approaches to equal protection: antisubordination and anticlassification. It …