| Venue: | SCOTUS |
| Facts: | UM Law School goes nuts to keep tabs on minority applicants. They are trying to get to "critical mass." |
| Posture: | 15-day bench trial. |
| Issue: | Is diversity a compelling interest that can justify the narrowly tailored use of race in selecting applicants for admission to public universities? |
| Holding: | Yes. |
| Rule: | You can use race when selecting students. |
| Reasoning: | Universities occupy a special place in our constitutional tradition.
We said in Bakke that a god faith effort would be
presumed to be OK. There are real benefits to diversity, and
law schools in particular are the training ground for our nations
leaders. Access to leadership must be open to all, or people
will not feel its lefitimate.
And this isn't mechanical like Gratz. 14A was about doing away with all governmentally imposed discrimination on the basis of race, so this really does have to be narrowly tailored. So it needs to have some termination point. |
| Dicta: | Scalia, dissenting: This "critical mass" is a farce. If this is
good for the university, let's see it in the civil service.
And also, we're just making this more complex yet again.
Thomas, dissenting: I believe that blacks can achieve in every avenue of American life without the meddling of university administrators. Kennedy, dissenting: This masks other nonsense-- there were arguments about whether Cuban-Americans counted as Hispanics because they were republicans. This is all way more cynical than is beinglet on. |