Federal judge rebuffs affirmative action

Federal judge rebuffs affirmative action

Tucson, Arizona Wednesday, 28 March 2001
http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/10328NMICH-AFFIRM-NYT.html
By Jodi Wilgoren

THE NEW YORK TIMES

A federal judge in Detroit ruled yesterday that the admissions system of the University of Michigan's law school was unconstitutional because of the way it considered an applicant's race.

The sweeping opinion contradicts a December ruling by another judge on the same court upholding the university's affirmative action program in undergraduate admissions. That decision, now on appeal, was seen as a flicker of hope for a movement fallen out of vogue while the new ruling joins a string of defeats for affirmative action over the past six years.

"All racial distinctions are inherently suspect and presumptively invalid," Judge Bernard A. Friedman of the U.S. District Court in Detroit wrote in his 90-page decision yesterday. "Whatever solution the law school elects to pursue, it must be race-neutral."

The current push against affirmative action began in 1995, when the regents of the University of California banned the use of race in admissions. A federal appeals court outlawed the practice in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana the next year, and since then, voters in California and Washington state have rejected affirmative action in both higher education and state contracting.

The debate over race-conscious policies is one of the most contentious in higher education today, and the closely watched Michigan cases are widely expected to send the issue back to the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time since 1978.

"We have here one of the most significant issues of our time," Lee C. Bollinger, the university president, said yester-day. "The ideal of the integrated society, the importance of higher education to that ideal - which is all consistent with the melting pot theory of American society - is really now drawn into question."

The class that entered the law school, one of the nation's best, last fall was about 85 percent white and Asian, 15 percent black and Hispanic.

The crucial question in both Michigan cases is whether racial and ethnic diversity in higher education is, in legal parlance, a "compelling state interest" that demands a race-conscious remedy.

The dueling decisions by the federal judges in Detroit turn on contrary interpretations of the landmark 1978 Supreme Court decision in University of California Regents v. Bakke, which struck down the admissions policy at the Davis, Calif., medical school but said universities could consider race as one of several "plus factors" in selecting applicants.