My Legal Right

Republican politicians usually stay away from “affirmative action.” If the topic doesn’t come up in conversation, most don’t bring it up. If it does come up, they stick to platitudes. I’m waiting for the Republican who includes racial preferences in his platform, with a campaign promise to abolish this practice in government. The Center for [...]

The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg has a blog post up at Minding the Campus about the Duke study I blogged about on Monday. His is a great title and sums up the main objection nicely: No Research, Please, Unless It Helps Our Cause The study revealed that white students enter college with higher [...]

Attorneys for New York City have asked that Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis be removed from the case that-shall-never-end for bias against white firefighters. Garaufis appointed an independent monitor to oversee FDNY’s efforts to increase so-called diversity in the department, which the judge called “a stubborn bastion of white male privilege.” About four million of [...]

…euphemistically known as “affirmative action.” When I first read about “What Happens After Enrollment: An Analysis of the Time Paths of Racial Difference in GPA and Major Choice (32 pages in PDF),” by Duke University economists Peter Arcidiacono and Esteban Aucejo and sociologist Ken Spenner, the results seemed intuitive to me. Students admitted with lesser [...]

The battle to overturn racial neutrality in California’s government continues. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that a federal court will consider a challenge to Proposition 209, a voter-approved law that bars the government from granting preferences to or discriminating against individuals or groups based on race in education, employment, and contracting. And Governor Jerry Brown [...]

Lee Bollinger, former president of the University of Michigan and defendant in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, penned an op-ed for the Washington Post. He still supports racial preferences. (Surprise!) Bollinger quotes a letter George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton about points he should have raised in his Farewell Address–education and the university–to [...]

Century Foundation senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg gets to the core issue in Fisher v. Texas, namely, why schools with race-neutral admissions policies that work still resort to racial preferences. From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The case, Fisher v. Texas, presents the question of whether an institution of higher education is allowed to use race [...]

One day the current crop of “affirmative action” opponents will be no more, which is why I’m heartened to know there are young people who think deeply about the unfairness of racial preferences and the double standards their existence encourages. Alex Gushner, a senior at the University of California at Santa Barbara, writes in the [...]

Why are some racial preferences opponents eager for the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit racial preferences? I want the court to hear Fisher v. Texas to determine how states have applied eight-year-old Grutter v. Bollinger, the case that allows taxpayer-supported schools to use race as a “plus” factor in admissions. Although schools must consider race-neutral [...]

Larry Purdy was trial counsel for plaintiffs Barbara Grutter and Jennifer Gratz in racial preferences cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. He also wrote a book titled Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity”: Searching for the Color-Blind Ideal, in which he offered a rebuttal to The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of [...]