In today’s Pope Center piece, attorney Larry Purdy, who was on Barbara Grutter’s legal team in 2003 when the Court ruled against her, explains why the Court should grant cert in Fisher v. Texas and use it to overturn its 2003 blunder. His piece links to a longer, legal argument he has written that works through the questions the case presents.
In a nutshell, the Court made a silly mistaken in declaring that student-body “diversity” (with regard only to the students’ ancestry) was a “compelling state interest.” The purported “educational benefits” are slight and speculative, while the harms are substantial, including the harm of saying that it is all right to treat some people differently from others merely on account of race.
Purdy, incidentally, is the author of a book on the issue of racial preferences, Getting Under the Skin of Diversity, which I reviewed here.