Will the Supreme Court’s recent decision against the legality of racial preferences matter?
Those on the left are wailing that it will have a terrible result because now “marginalized” (as they like to say) students will be denied the opportunity to go to a prestige school. (Their assumption that if you don’t go to a prestige school, you’ve been put at a huge disadvantage is mistaken, but let’s put that aside.) On the other hand, many on the right say that the ruling won’t matter much because the schools will just figure out ways of playing their beloved preference games anyway.
Taking issue with both sides is Northwestern law professor John O. McGinnis in this Law & Liberty essay.
He writes, “Some law school administrations would like to continue to choose by race and ethnicity despite the Supreme Court’s ruling. But every method of doing so poses significant problems. Simply reverse-engineering their admission criteria to achieve their preferred racial and ethnic composition will run afoul of the Court’s decision and likely be struck down by lower courts. Eliminating objective, merit-based criteria will decrease the quality among all racial groups. Alternatively, embracing more ideological criteria for admission is unlikely to be effective for racial and ethnic balancing and will raise questions about the political neutrality of law schools.”
Could be, but it seems to me that most law-school administrators stopped caring about the perceived lack of political neutrality of their institutions long ago.
Read the whole thing.