Replies

"Race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time. The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today."
- Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, 23 June 2003

I'm not a Constitutional scholar. Does anyone recall any reference to 25 years in that document? Anything even allowing for the imposition of such a timeframe for Constitution-derived policy?

"Does anyone recall any reference to 25 years in that document? Anything even allowing for the imposition of such a timeframe for Constitution-derived policy?"

I'm pretty sure it was in the fine print at the back, you know, the boilerplate the Founders wrote in really small calligraphy. /sarc

O'Connor's affirmative-action appointment is a prime example of why 'affirmative action' hiring NEVER ends up putting the best candidate in the job. Sometimes it gets lucky by tapping a supremely COMPETENT person for the job (Justice Thomas is a shining example of such a lucky roll of the dice) but most often, the best mind for the job is overlooked, as it was when she was appointed simply because of her irrelevant physical features. Reviewing her opinions, laden with more balancing tests than a glue factory with horse apples, one is reminded of the old saw about why God gave blondes 2% more brains than horses, except that she's pooped all over the Constitution anyway with her silly equivocations.

She has been a disappointment on so many levels that her arrival on the bench cannot help but to have been a setback for her sex, almost to the point that her Grutter ruling is understandable--it may be that she recognizes the damage she's done to the perception of women as men's intellectual equals, and hopes to compensate for it by keeping affirmative action in place for the 25-odd years it'll take to undo the sexism she's engendered.