Grutter Redo, Part 3
posted by Michelle Adams
Recall that in a earlier post, I wrote about Judge Kozinski’s concurring opinion in the 9th Circuit ruling which upheld the Seattle school choice plan. His view was that rational basis review was preferable and strict scrutiny inappropriate because while the “program does use race as a criterion, [it does so] only to ensure that the population of each public school roughly reflects the city’s racial composition.” Kozinski’s position raises a number of interesting questions — at least one of which I alluded to before — the potential appeal of his approach to Justice Kennedy. But now I want to focus on the normative question which lies at the heart of Kozinski’s approach.
Let us set aside for a moment the Court’s view, which it has repeatedly reaffirmed in cases like Adarand, Grutter and Johnson v. California, that strict scrutiny review must apply to all racial classifications. The question I want to pose is this: is there a meaningful distinction between the racial preference that was at issue in Grutter, and the racial classification scheme that is challenged in the K-12 cases the Court has recently accepted. To assist you in answering this question, I’ll provide a quick review of the use of race in the two situations.
Grutter concerned the University of Michigan Law School’s admissions policy which sought to enroll a “critical mass of underrepresented minority students.” In short, while the policy did not set aside a fixed number of seats in the incoming class for minority group members, it did consider race or ethnicity “flexibly as a ‘plus’ factor in the context of individualized consideration of each and every applicant.” Even though race was used flexibly (no bonus points or set asides as was the case in Bakke), there is little doubt that with respect to some candidates, race was outcome determinative. That is, race was outcome determinative for some white candidates in the sense that minority group members with identical qualifications would have been admitted to the Law School while they were not. (We can address the standing difficulties raised under this scenario at a different time.)
Contrast the Law School’s admissions plan in Grutter with the Seattle school choice plan. Under the Seattle plan, race was used as a tiebreaker. In the first instance, students are given their choice of schools. It is only when a school becomes oversubscribed and racially imbalanced that the racial tiebreaker comes into play, and even then it only operates on the margins; effecting only schools where the “student body differs by more than 15 percent from the racial make up of the students of the Seattle public schools as a whole.” Finally, we should note that under the Seattle plan, no student is denied an opportunity to attend a public school in the school district; all students are placed in some public school within the district. Thus, Judge Kozinski’s view of the Seattle plan was, “that a student is denied a school of his choice may be disappointing, but it carries no racial stigma and says nothing at all about that individual’s aptitude or ability.”
Do you agree? Are the Grutter and Seattle plans distinguishable? Is it really true that one plan attaches “stigma” to a frustrated applicant while the other inflicts no such stigmatic harm to the students? Isn’t one argument that the stigmatic impact of each plan is a matter of degree. If that’s the case, then perhaps Kozinski is right after all that a heightened form of rational basis review is superior because it would allow the Court to take all of the relevant facts into consideration. Unless you think strict scrutiny, in the race context at least, already performs this function.
June 8, 2006 at 10:53 am
Posted in: Civil Rights, Constitutional Law, Race, Supreme Court
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Responses (1)
Maryland Conservatarian - June 8, 2006 at 5:49 pm
“stigma” is in the eyes of the beholder..which makes Judge K’s comments surprisingly unpersuasive. The problem in Seattle began because there was a perceived difference in the quality of schools assigned – the fact that there may not be any perceived racial stigma attached or that it is not an objective mark of an individual’s aptitude is irrelevant to the “disappointed” individual.
That certain schools carry more prestige than others may be nonsensical when looked at objectively but since it’s real (and all you who eschewed state law schools for the prestige of Harvard and the like know what I mean), how do you concretely make the case that the as-yet unproven value of a specifically defined, skin-deep diversity trumps an individual’s school choice (even though we know how Seattle Public Schools feel about “individualism” – it’s rascist)
The problem with using different standards of review is who gets to decide the what and when of the different standards. Since I’ve seen or read nothing that convinces me the judicial branch has any more wisdom or relevant experience than the rest of us, I certainly don’t want such a non-diverse group (they’re all lawyers!) like them making the decision as to who can discriminate and who can’t. Either it’s always wrong or we let the local communities decide when it’s appropriate…
…which means, while I consider Seattle’s approach incredibly poor policy(although I understand they are not using it right now, pending the case completion), I’m inclined to let them resume botching it up so as to act as a case study for the rest of us on the perils of social gerrymandering by The Anointed.
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