4/27/2023 0 Comments Sandra day o connor supreme court![]() Nearly two decades since Grutter, proponents and observers of race-conscious admissions say alternatives to race-neutral means of achieving student diversity, such as test-optional admissions, have had limited success. “In today’s America, I’m inclined to think that race still matters in painful ways,” she said in a 2008 keynote address at Harvard Law School.Įvan Thomas, O’Connor’s biographer, wrote in the Atlantic that the justice told a close friend after her retirement that there was “no timetable” for predicting when affirmative action would no longer be necessary. O’Connor has voiced regrets about her wording in Grutter as early as five years after the ruling, citing continued racial inequities and limited progress toward narrowing educational opportunity gaps. Most law scholars “do expect it to have some influence or make an appearance in the Harvard case because we are getting so close to that 25 years,” said Devon Westhill, president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity. But they also say it could give the justices an opening to rule against Harvard and further pare back how schools can use race as a factor in admissions, or avoid ruling on affirmative action cases by seeing 2028 as a deadline. O’Connor subsequently walked back the line, and most constitutional law scholars consider it unduly optimistic rhetoric about the nation’s future rather than binding legal precedent. Bollinger, a case involving the University of Michigan.Įighteen years later, what the retired justice meant to convey in that statement could help form arguments at the Supreme Court if its conservative majority takes up a challenge to Harvard College’s race-conscious admissions system. ![]() “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” O’Connor wrote in Grutter v. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion preserving affirmative action in a 2003 case included some declarative wording that justices tend to avoid-and that the justice came to regret using.
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