Here they come again: the justices and affirmative action

Stop me if you have heard this one before: a student applies to an elite university and is denied admission.  Incidentally, admissions officials concede that they consider many different factors when making decisions, one of which is the race of the applicant.  The student who is denied admission then searches through the many applications only to discover that some Black and Latino applicants with lesser grades and/or test scores are granted admission to said university.  Alas, a federal case is born.

Abigail Fisher is only the latest in a long line of white applicants so aggrieved. It just so happens, however, that the U.S. Supreme Court might finally fall for the ruse once and for all.  Or in the words of Adam Liptak, "college diversity nears its last stand." 

This is ridiculous on too many levels. It is not terribly difficult to parse through the applicant pool and find admitted Black and Latino applicants who scored worse yet got in.  But it is also not terribly difficult to find in-state residents who scored worse than out-of-state residents yet got in, or mountain climbers, or sons and daughters of alumni, or applicants who can throw a football or hit a ball with a stick.  Somehow, we need an argument in order to differentiate the use of race from all these other factors.  But the justices -- or for that matter, critics of affirmative action -- have yet to offer one.

Here is what passes for a good argument nowadays, from anthropologist Peter Wood:

“The part of diversity that matters to me and a lot of academics is the intellectual diversity of the classroom. . . .  The pursuit of a genuine variety of opinions that are well thought through and well grounded is essential. But that has an off-and-on, hit-or-miss connection with ethnic and racial diversity.”

Here is another, from Yale law professor Peter H. Schuck: “The idea of racial and ethnic diversity altering the kind of conversation that goes on in the classroom is so overrated.” 

I happily concede either argument.  But note that similar things could be said about the use of any other factor considered by universities today, from the use of legacy or residency to extra points for doing extracurricular work or having elite athletic credentials.  

The point is this: the critics are make policy arguments, not constitutional ones.  So the issue here is whether the Constitution has anything to say about this question. If the Court's opinions are any indication, it appears that the answer is not as easy as one might think.

Here's what I would love to see in these opinions: a detailed analysis of the history of the 14th Amendment and the reasons why the Reconstruction Congress -- Bingham, Trumbull, and friends -- intended to bar the use of race by the state.  I think this is a tough argument to make, but I suppose it is possible.  Surely, I would expect Justice Thomas to at least pretend that such an argument exists.  Instead, all we get are silly and inane platitudes about the harmful effects of using racial factors.  

Hypocrisy is not becoming, much less by our resident philosopher kings.

Also, whatever happened to the norm of stare decisis?  I would expect the conservative justices to be particularly sensitive to this norm, and the notion that the public has a right to expect that the Court will not change its collective mind as the institution changes membership.  After all, remember the debate during the Kagan nomination about what makes a judge an activist.  The answer from the Republican leadership in the Senate, using the example of Justice Marshall, was that an activist judge is a judge that does not abide by established precedent.  They used the example of the death penalty and how Justice Marshall refused to accept these cases as settled law and instead continued to dissent in case after case. 

Could they really turn around this quickly and overturn Grutter, decided in 2003?

I still think that the case is still up for grabs.  The conventional wisdom is that the five conservative justices on the Court are prepared to take on Grutter.  Yet Justice Kennedy might not be quite so willing. His views on this question may be changing.  His recent concurring opinion in Parents Involved, for example, show a side of Justice Kennedy we had not seen before.  He even went as far as push back on the old conservative trope, Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy. But to say that Justice Kennedy's views are evolving should not surprise anyone. Such is the lot of the super median.

In the end, he might ultimately save the Court from this embarrassment.