Color and the court
...ustices into two teams, one conservative and the other moderate. Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and O’Connor head the conservative team. The moderate team is composed of Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer. Next, Edley makes three distinct arguments: First, the Supreme Court must decide whether there is a compelling governmental interest in the way affirmative action is used by school districts and colleges across the country to promote diversity. Edley makes the comment that states are gerrymandering the school boundaries in order to achieve racial segregation. Universities typically use Affirmative Action to determine the racial makeup of their incoming classes. Some, however, think this is just another type of discrimination. One critic of this view is Jennifer Gratz who, in a recent article (Mears 2003), said: I think it’s a shame that the university looks at minority students and basically tells them that they are inferior and need these points to be accepted. If you assume a non-affirmative action admission policies are inherently biased toward a particular race, then an admission-biased policies that is overly biased toward any other race is, by definition, biased as well. Edley’s second argument is that, if the conservative team gains a majority in the Supreme Court, then instances of race-related remedies would be limited to recent events and specific instances of intentional discrimination. I find this argument a little narrow in scope; it lacks the type of details for an emotional appeal tha...