Lundi, 26 Juillet, 2021 - 19:45
The policy has made diversity possible. Now, after decades of debate, the Supreme Court is poised to decide its fate.
The Court may signal that it considers efforts aimed explicitly at racial equity to be unconstitutional.
1. the history
In June, 2016, Justice Samuel Alito took the unusual step of reading aloud from the bench a version of his lengthy dissent in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. A white applicant who had been denied admission had sued, saying that she’d been discriminated against because of her race. The Supreme Court, by the narrowest of margins and on the narrowest of grounds, upheld Texas’s admissions policy. Alito, with steely indignation, picked apart the logic of U.T.’s arguments and of his colleagues’ majority opinion. “This is affirmative action gone berserk,” he declared.
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As someone who grew up and still lives in the Atlanta metro area – where the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still permeates the environment like the azaleas and dogwoods that bloom in April – I have had instilled in me since my childhood Dr. King’s belief that individuals should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” And I can only wonder how Dr. King would have responded to President Biden’s plans to redress what he believes to be the result of racial discrimination by…employing more racial discrimination.
Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Photo of Chemerinsky by Jim Block.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn t heed calls to resign when law dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote a March 2014 op-ed making that plea.
Now, Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law and a frequent ABA Journal contributor, is asking Justice Stephen G. Breyer to retire and pointing to Ginsburg’s failure to do so as instructive.
Ginsburg died about two months before the presidential election last year, but the then-Republican-controlled U.S. Senate quickly confirmed former President Donald Trump’s conservative nominee, the now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett.