Articles, notes, and symposia pieces published in CLR’s print volumes.
Print Edition
The Incoherence of the “Colorblind Constitution”
The Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College majority opinion has been widely misunderstood as a victory for those who believe in the “colorblind Constitution.” By juxtaposing the opinion’s main rule with the exception for admitting students based on essays that discuss students’ lived experiences with race, Robinson reveals the opinion’s fundamental incoherence, as well as its furtive race-consciousness. This examination reveals the chasm between colorblind rhetoric and the inescapability of racially-forged realities.
SFFA: Bakke’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Implicit in inquiries about Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard’s relationship to precedent is an assumption about the affirmative action cases that preceded SFFA—namely, that Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and its progeny represented a victory for proponents of affirmative action. This Essay complicates that view. Our central claim is that Bakke contained many losses for proponents of affirmative action and that the specific nature of those losses set the stage for precisely the outcome SFFA instantiates.