Question about race and admissions

fabrizio
Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:49:58 +0000

Newjack88,

You don’t have to discuss it. I can accept your silence as an implicit acknowledgment that your “interests indicate ethnicity” argument is weak.

I omitted an important word in my comment regarding Justice Breyer; that is my mistake. As the Chief Justice wrote in Parents Involved, “Justice Breyer’s dissent also asserts that these cases are controlled by Grutter, claiming that the existence of a compelling interest in these cases “follows a fortiori” from Grutter, post, at 41, 64–66, and accusing us of tacitly overruling that case.”

The Chief Justice believed that the situation in Parents Involved and Grutter were related but nonetheless different. If Grutter truly “had nothing to do with the case [Parents Involved],” as you assert, then it would not have been necessary to refer to Grutter at all. In fact, the Chief Justice referred to Grutter many times in the Court’s opinion. Moreover, in his dissent, Justice Breyer argued that far from having “nothing to do with the case,” Grutter was essential to the understanding of Parents Involved.

If the Justices felt that was necessary to refer back to Grutter, then it indeed had something to do with the case.