A Black and White Case: How Affirmative Action Survived Its Greatest Legal Challenge - Hardcover

Stohr, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576601706 ISBN 13: 9781576601709

Publisher: Bloomberg Press, 2004

Synopsis

In the late 1990s, two lawsuits by white applicants who had been rejected by the University of Michigan began working their way through the federal court system, aimed at the abolition of racial preferences in college admissions. The stakes were high, the constitutional questions profound, the politics and emotions explosive. It was soon evident that the matter was headed for the highest court in the land, but there all clarity ended.

To the plaintiffs and the feisty public-interest law firm that backed them, the suits were a long overdue assault on reverse discrimination. The Constitution, strictly construed, was color-blind. Discrimination under any guise was not only illegal, it was the wrong way to set history right in a nation that had been troubled and divided by the uses and misuses of race for more than two hundred years.

To the University of Michigan, and to other top institutions striving to expand opportunity and create diverse, representative student bodies, it looked as if most of what had been put in place since the 1978 Bakke v. University of California decision was about to be undone. Black and Hispanic students were in danger of being once again largely shut out of the most important avenue of advancement in America, an elite education. To some, it appeared likely that racial integration was about to suffer their worst setback since the start of the civil rights movement.

In A Black and White Case, veteran Supreme Court reporter Greg Stohr portrays the individual dramas and exposes the human passions that colored and propelled this momentous legal struggle. His fascinating account takes us deep inside America’s court system, where logic collides with emotion, and common sense must contend with the majesty and sometimes the seeming perversity of the law. He follows the trail from Michigan to Washington, DC, revealing how lawyers argued and strategized, how lower-court judges fought behind the scenes for control of the cases, and why the White House filed a brief in support of the white students, in opposition to a chorus of retired generals and admirals worried that the military academies would no longer reflect the face of America.

Finally, Stohr details the fallout from the Supreme Court's controversial 2003 ruling that both upheld affirmative action and upended some of the methods that had been used to effect it. And he shows how colleges and universities are reshaping their affirmative action policies--an evolution closely watched by lower courts, employers, civil rights lawyers, legislators, regulators, and the public.

A Black and White Case brings alive and brilliantly explains one of the most important Supreme Court decisions on the fundamental and divisive subject of race relations in America.

About this title

About the Author

Stohr has been the Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter since 1998. A former judicial clerk and Congressional and campaign press secretary, he graduated with honors from Harvard Law School in 1995.

From Publishers Weekly

Stohr, Bloomberg News's Supreme Court reporter, offers a balanced chronicle of the hotly contested, headline-making litigation brought to prevent the University of Michigan and its law school from using affirmative action in their admissions processes. The conservative Center for Individual Rights brought a constitutional test case by recruiting rejected white applicants (who had higher grades and test scores than admitted blacks) as plaintiffs and filing complaints in late 1997. Stohr follows the unfolding lawsuit step by step, from trial court to appeals court to the Supreme Court, which in 2003 rejected outright numerical advantages for minority applicants, but permitted the university to assemble a diverse class of students containing a "critical mass" of minorities. Throughout, Stohr pays attention to the participants—the plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers and judges—explaining their backgrounds and their stances on affirmative action, and sets out the issues in simple language. Stohr spotlights one fascinating feature of the case: the role of scores of amicus ("friend of the court") briefs filed on both sides. Amicus briefs from the military services, for instance, supported affirmative action, arguing that diversity at military academies is a matter of national security. As Stohr concludes, the Supreme Court assured that "[r]ace-based admissions would be around for at least another generation." 29 b&w photos.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomberg Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1576601706
• ISBN 13: 9781576601709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 352