princetonlegaljournal, Author at Princeton Legal Journal

Asian American Lawyers: Then and Now

by Rebecca Cao

1 Prin.L.J.F. 29

Introduction

Conversations about Asian Americans have only just captured national attention as anti-Asian hate crimes have escalated amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Within the past two years, numerous discussions about Asian American identity, stereotypes of Asians, and America’s egregious history of exclusion against Asian Americans have surfaced, and, most recently in July 2021, Illinois became the first state to require the teaching of Asian American history in public school classrooms. As an aspiring lawyer who has paid attention to and often participated in such discourse, I have especially wanted to learn more about Asian American lawyers, who I believe can further enrich and complicate our understanding of Asian Americans overall. In what context did the first Asian American lawyers emerge? Who were some of the most prominent Asian American lawyers in the past, and how have they shaped American law? What are the unique obstacles that Asian American lawyers endure today? These are just some of the questions that have long interested me, and I will attempt to answer them in this article.

While I have discovered a few sources that already examine these issues (which will be referenced later), this article will aim to provide a more cohesive narrative demonstrating the overall journey of Asian American lawyers from the 1880s to modern years. Its purpose is twofold: to briefly trace the emergence of Asian American lawyers throughout American history, and to illuminate the present conditions and challenges of Asian American lawyers today. To be clear, it is beyond the scope of this article to be comprehensive; it does not attempt to identify every single Asian American lawyer in Asian American history, and neither will it attempt to explicate every event or idea relevant to this topic. Instead, it will focus on what appears to be the most salient, recurring themes that characterize the Asian American experience in the legal field. More information about Asian American lawyers will likely be unearthed in later years, but I hope that this article will inspire more conversations about their impact and struggles in the meantime.

Asian American Lawyers Throughout American History

The first Chinese American licensed to practice law in the U.S. was Hong Yen Chang, born in Guangdong, China, who immigrated to America in 1872 as one of the 120 Chinese boys sent to study in the U.S. through the Chinese Educational Mission. Chang had arrived during a time of escalating anti-Chinese sentiment in America. One reason for such racial hostility included claims that the Chinese were inherently inferior, as demonstrated in the California Supreme Court’s 1854 ruling in People vs. Hall where Chief Justice John Murray wrote that the Chinese were “incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as history has shown.” As the number of Chinese immigrants working in America’s gold mines, factories, and agriculture grew, allegations from other laborers in America’s economy that the Chinese posed an economic threat further exacerbated racial tensions. Pressured by such xenophobia pervading the nation, the government eventually passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers in mining from immigrating to the U.S. for ten years (and it would eventually be extended for another 10 years by the 1892 Geary Act, which also required all Chinese living in the U.S. to carry identification papers—which many observed were similar to “dog tags”—at all times or suffer deportation). When Chang sought admission to the New York State Bar Association, the state’s Supreme Court rejected him since the Exclusion Act barred him from U.S. citizenship. But after Chang pressured the Association for two years, they eventually issued him a naturalization certificate and allowed him to reapply to the bar again. He was admitted in 1887. However, Chang was not as fortunate when he later moved to California, where the state’s Supreme Court deemed that his naturalization certificate from New York was invalid and thus rejected him from the bar. Chang was never allowed to practice law in California, although thanks to petitions from groups of law school students such as the Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, he was posthumously granted admission to the state’s Bar Association 130 years later in 2015. The first Chinese American lawyer in California wouldn’t emerge until nearly four decades after the Court’s decision in Chang’s case, when You Chung Hong, a son of Chinese immigrants, passed the state’s bar in 1923. He worked to repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that had obstructed Chang’s admission to the bar, testified in the U.S. Senate on immigration laws, and in 1933, became the first Chinese American permitted to practice before the Supreme Court.

Alongside the Chinese Exclusion Act, the government also passed legislation thwarting South Asians from entering the U.S during this time. In 1917, the U.S. banned immigration from the entire Indian subcontinent through the Barred Zone Act. In the 1923 case, U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court ruled that Southeast Asians were ineligible for naturalization. An immigrant from Punjab, India, Dalip Singh Saund campaigned against these discriminatory policies. His efforts eventually resulted in Congress passing the Luce-Celler Act of 1946, which permitted more South Asians to immigrate to the U.S. and become U.S. citizens. After becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1949, Saund was elected to Congress in the House of Representatives—and re-elected twice—thus becoming the first Asian American, Indian American, and first Sikh American to do so.

More Asian American lawyers emerged during and shortly after the U.S.’ participation in World War II. For example, Minoru Yasui, a Japanese American lawyer, established a practice in Portland to help Japanese Americans affected by Executive Order 9066, by which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the internment of Japanese Americans and noncitizens from Japan. Yasui also refused to evacuate to an internment camp and was consequently sentenced to a year in prison. When he was released in 1944, he practiced law in Colorado, where he advocated for the Japanese community in America to receive reparations. During this time, Fred Korematsu, a son of Japanese immigrants, was arrested for resisting his displacement to an internment camp; this incident would eventually result in Korematsu vs. U.S. (1944), where the Supreme Court upheld Executive Order 9066—but nearly four decades later in 1983, Dale Minami, an Asian American lawyer, would reopen and help overturn this decision.

Furthermore, although they are often overlooked, Asian American lawyers directly served in America’s war efforts. Herbert Choy, a graduate of Harvard Law School, served in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps (from 1942-1946), which “represents the legal interests of soldiers and the U.S. Army,” according to the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps brochure. When he returned to America, he became the first Korean American in the United States admitted to the bar. Another Asian American graduate of Harvard Law School, Hiram Fong, served as Judge Advocate in the U.S. Air Force, after which he became the first Asian American U.S. Senator from 1959 to 1977 from Hawaii and the first Asian American to receive delegate votes to be nominated for the President of the United States.

Asian American lawyers also actively contributed to the social change movements that swept America in the 1960s—most notably, Patsy Mink, a third-generation Japanese American from Hawaii and graduate of University of Chicago Law School. Several years after being rejected from all jobs she applied to because of her interracial marriage, Mink became the first Asian American woman to serve in Congress when she won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1964. As a Congresswoman, Mink helped address the needs of the women’s rights movement through sponsoring the first childcare bill, in addition to passing the 1974 Women’s Educational Equity Act which allocated $30 million a year for programs in schools that promoted gender equality, improved women’s academic and job opportunities, and expunged gender stereotypes from educational curricula. She even co-wrote the Title IX law which stated that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Mink also championed educational reform more broadly as she pushed for legislation introducing bilingual education, in addition to introducing the first Early Childhood Education Act.

Asian American Lawyers in the Modern Era

The population of Asian American lawyers has grown considerably since the 2000s. According to “A Portrait of Asian Americans in the Law,” a 2017 report published by Yale Law School and the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association and compiled by Eric Chung, Samuel Dong, Xiaonan April Hu, Christine Kwon, and Goodwin Liu, “the number of Asian American lawyers has grown from 20,000 [in 2000] to 53,000 [in 2017], comprising nearly 5 percent of all lawyers nationwide.” Additionally, the report establishes that over the past three decades, the number of Asian Americans enrolled in law school has nearly quadrupled to 8,000, demonstrating the largest spike of any racial or ethnic group—and that they are more likely to attend highly ranked law schools. But it also notes that most recently in 2016, the number of Asian American students entering law school in general was the lowest in more than 20 years. The report doesn’t attribute an exact reason for such a steep decline and recommends further research into this trendline.

With respect to the numerous Asian American lawyers who are already in the field today, however, data from the report reveals that very few of them hold leadership positions in the legal profession. Of course, while Kamala Harris has become the first South Asian American Vice President, most Asian American lawyers in general struggle to become leaders. Although 7.05% of respondents in the Vault and Minority Corporate Counsel Association’s (Vault/MCCA) 2015 survey of 225 law firms were Asian American, the data indicated that only 2.09% of them had seats on executive management committees, 2.32% on partner review committees, and 3.78% on associate review committees. Moreover, few Asian Americans serve as state judges. Even in states such as Maryland and New York—both home to a significant number of Asian Americans—less than 1 percent of their state appellate or general jurisdiction trial judges were Asian American in 2014. Even fewer Asian Americans serve in supervisory positions at the federal level; the “Portrait” highlights that in 2016, there were only three Asian American United States Attorneys in office—out of all 94 available positions—with one in each of the following areas: Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Southern District of New York. Data from a 2014 survey in the “Portrait” also found that, out of the 2,437 elected prosecutors in the nation, only four were Asian American. Asian Americans also rarely serve in the higher ranks of academic administration at law schools. In 2013, only three Asian Americans were law deans out of the 202 in the country, and only 18 Asian Americans out of the nation’s 709 associate or vice deans.

Why, despite demonstrating an overall and significant growth of lawyers, is there such a dearth of Asian Americans working as leaders in the law? A possible answer may include the model minority myth, which stereotypes Asian Americans as hardworking and “smart,” but too passive and socially inept to hold leadership positions. Indeed, in Elisabeth Frater’s article, “Asian American Attorneys: Shattering Conventional Norms,” Reed Smith Partner Min S. Suh confirms that “there is a perception, especially in the legal community, that Asian American lawyers are not suitable for management or leadership positions due to the stereotype that Asian Americans lack the personality to influence and lead others.” Joseph J. Centeno, a partner with Philadelphia’s Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippe, further buttresses this point: he adds that “in our society, to be a leader in any industry, you have to be bold, you have to take risks, and you have to be out there and network and create relationships with people… but Asian Americans [are often seen as] not being aggressive or assertive and being meek or sometimes a geek.” In the survey featured in the “Portrait,” many Asian American lawyers indicated that, throughout their experience in the legal profession, the most common traits that they were associated with at their jobs were “quiet,” “introverted,” “passive,” and “awkward.” Few to none of them reported that they believed they were seen as “assertive,” “extroverted,” or “loud.”

The misconception of Asians as perpetual foreigners in America may also account for another reason why Asian Americans struggle to further advance in the legal field. In the “Portrait” survey, one Asian American lawyer reported that “[she’s] an immigration lawyer. When [she] go[es] to immigration court, [she’s] mistaken for the alien.” Moreover, the Western fetishization of the sexualized, “exotic” Asian woman also poses significant obstacles for female Asian American lawyers that may thwart them from further elevating their legal careers. The same immigration lawyer from the “Portrait” survey mentioned above also revealed that “when [she] go[es] to jail to visit a client, [she’s] mistaken for their girlfriend.” Another respondent in the “Portrait” survey explained that “being an Asian woman added another layer as men were often more interested in expressing themselves as romantic prospects as opposed to colleagues.”

Moving Forward

Sources confirm that Asian American lawyers have demonstrated outstanding progress since the 1880s, despite having once been barred from practicing law. Yet they continue to face significant obstacles in the profession. Although Asian American lawyers have helped shape, build, and change American law for nearly 200 years, they are still reduced to outdated, fictitious stereotypes that preclude them from becoming leaders in the field today. Now it is time for those not only in the legal field, but also the rest of America in general, to reflect on these realities and consider how we should move forward and treat our Asian American lawyers in the future to help them reach their full potential.

The Attractive Non-Sequitur of Democracy and Distrust

by JC Martinez

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1 Prin.L.J.F. 24

When it comes to interpreting the Constitution, there is a critical and possibly irresolvable dilemma which lies at the crux of countless arguments: should justices remain rigidly faithful to the original intent of the document’s writers at the risk of being anachronistic, or should they make substantive value choices at the risk of encroaching upon the legislature’s right and duty to represent the will of the people? John Hart Ely, the late, pathbreaking scholar of constitutional law, famously rejected this stubborn question as a false dichotomy. In his pivotal work Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review, Ely posits a third, middle approach to judicial review oriented toward reinforcing representative democracy, advancing a thesis so original that when the sentient student of constitutional law first grasps its thrust, their heart skips a beat in response to what seems like the light of an escape route from the foregoing dichotomy between two undesirable jurisprudences: first, what Ely calls clause-bound interpretivism, the strict strand of originalism woefully unable to make neither heads nor tails of the document’s open-ended provisions, and, second, what Ely calls non-interpretivism (and what might crudely be termed ‘living constitutionalism’), unsatisfactory in its rank inability to explain why one collection of substantive values should be given preference over any other. (These terms will be further clarified shortly.)

Although Ely’s theory is initially attractive, once the impression of the ‘golden mean’ fallacy fades, reservations about his argument arise, and along multiple fronts. These include the legitimacy of his conception of the Constitution, whether his theory of judicial review validly or necessarily follows from his conception of the Constitution as he establishes, and whether the theory ultimately escapes the substantive value judgments he seeks to avoid. With respect to the power it affords justices, Ely’s approach has simultaneously been criticized as too broad and too narrow. I will end by evaluating these arguments and making a closing note on the nature of Ely’s theory.

First, an explanation of Ely’s argument and terms is needed. The most natural way to start such an account, in accordance with the ordering of the chapters in Democracy and Distrust, is to begin with Ely’s critical analysis of the two alternatives to his middle approach and the reasons for which he argues they ultimately fail. The more general dichotomy is that of interpretivism versus non-interpretivism. The former espouses the credo that “judges deciding constitutional issues should confine themselves to enforcing norms that are stated or clearly implicit in the written Constitution,” while the latter holds “the contrary view that courts should go beyond that set of references and enforce norms that cannot be discovered within the four corners of the document” (1). The appeal of interpretivism is that it simultaneously supports judicial review but is not vulnerable to the criticism of being undemocratic. Clause-bound interpretivism, a more restrictive subset of interpretivism, contends that “the various provisions of the Constitution be approached essentially as self-contained units and interpreted on the basis of their language,” and by an unwillingness to insert significant “content from outside the provision,” only allowing for “whatever interpretive help the legislative history can provide” (12-13).

Things get trickier, however, when one considers that provisions in the Constitution run the gamut from precise to incredibly open-ended. Ely compares, for instance, the specific requirement that the President be at least thirty-five years old with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments, whose imprecise language (consider that it did not specifically ban, say, flogging) seems written with the intention of providing at least some degree of interpretive breathing room. Even more jarring would be to consider the utter generalities of the Ninth Amendment.

The problem, therefore, is that the clause-bound interpretivist is caught in a stalemate. They are unable to refer exclusively to the text, for the text’s open-ended provisions point to objects external to the document itself, and yet are unwilling, by definition, to grapple with what those objects may be. The mildly clever clause-bound interpretivist, if unsatisfied with this internal tension, might submit in defense that the tension evaporates if the open-ended text of, say, the Ninth Amendment is simply assumed to protect rights without which the enumerated Bill of Rights’ guarantees cannot accurately be said to exist. But what in the text justifies that interpretive move, which is arguably as arbitrary and substantive as any, and could not, again, find clear justification in the text (outside of question-begging arguments)?

The incompleteness of the clause-bound interpretivist’s account then provides the motivation to consider extratextual sources from which a prudent judge might draw appropriately fundamental values, consistent with the non-interpretivist’s approach. In Ely’s third chapter, he analyzes leading contenders, including the judge’s own values, Natural Law, neutral principles, reason, tradition, consensus, and predicting progress. His analysis levels a brutal attack on their legitimacy, showing all seemingly plausible sources to be so grossly insufficient that the reader feels like a sailor whose ship has been smashed on the rocks and is grasping for the wooden plank of Ely’s novel theory as a final saving grace.

Having shown both clause-bound interpretivism and non-interpretivism to be both severely lacking, Ely advances his middle theory of judicial review, which importantly, is necessarily contingent upon a conceptualization of the Constitution as a fundamentally procedural document, and not as meant to protect particular substantive values. Ely writes “that the original Constitution was principally, indeed [he] would say overwhelmingly, dedicated to concerns of process and structure and not to the identification and preservation of specific substantive values” (92). Ely encourages the skeptical reader to read a few pages of the Constitution, as it would become clear that it was fundamentally procedural.

Accordingly, Ely suggests that the judiciary adopt a role akin to that of a referee. Such a judge would leave substantive value judgments to the legislative branch and merely attend to the proper functioning of the process of representative democracy, guarding against two key threats: one, those in power blocking the channels of political change, and two, representatives denying protection to politically weak minorities that groups have it, especially for reasons of hostility. Ely thus bypasses the problem of non-interpretivism by leaving substantive value choices to the legislature, and he plausibly but perhaps not conclusively ties the open-ended clauses to the theme of reinforcing democracy, getting around the problem of the clause-bound interpretivist.

To the extent that the measure of what a document primarily concerns is to be graded by the number of words or clauses written in the document about that object, so far so good. To debate that point would simply be a linguistic distraction that focuses on what it means for a document to be “primarily concerned” with one thing. However, Ely’s argument is precisely that because the Constitution is a fundamentally procedural document, judges should, when deciding how to interpret the Constitution’s open-ended provisions, be led predominantly by procedural considerations—namely, participation-oriented, representation-reinforcing tenets core to representative democracy.

So, there is an immediate soft spot here. Though I conceded that the Constitution can be said to be primarily concerned with procedure, depending upon how one wishes to define what it means for a document to be ‘primarily concerned’ with something, an unjustified leap appears to have been made; why should judges interpret open-ended provisions predominantly looking to the procedures of representative democracy? This conclusion relies on a conception of the Constitution as primarily concerned with procedure not just in the conceded sense that more clauses were written about procedure, but in the more expansive sense that the document’s interpreters should look first and foremost to procedure. But this second, larger sense of what it means to be ‘primarily concerned’ with something has not been demonstrated or conceded, and so should be read as asserted.

To illustrate what I mean, consider a brief counterfactual. Imagine that, growing up, my brother and I sketched a paper outlining who does which chores around the house. Is the document primarily concerned with chores—about which more words are written—or with the unmentioned fairness as a substantive value which the document’s procedures seek to protect? (Or, if I had more chores around the house, the substantive value may not be fairness but the responsibility that should—‘should’ implies a value choice—come along with growing older.) That’s a semantic point, as I have said. If my brother and I had a dispute, however, and my mother stepped in, would her mediation be primarily concerned with the underlying substantive value or with chores? Clearly, it is not chores simply because more words were written about them.

Moreover, it hardly seems as though Ely’s approach eliminates substantive value judgments by counseling a judge to only concern themself with reinforcing representative democracy. How might a judge decide on voter identification laws without making substantive value choices? Why, without appealing to substantive value, is it not the case, as John Stuart Mill notoriously advocated, that highly-educated individuals receive disproportionately weighted votes? It hardly seems plausible that such a question could be answered without appealing to substantive values like fairness.

Such considerations give credence to the concern that, under Ely’s theory, judges are given too much power. The way in which justices are empowered involves giving them a mandate to strike down the products of an electorally accountable legislature, ironically, in the name of representing democracy. Also, considering that these decisions, as I have submitted, are often difficult to disentangle from substantive value judgments, the result of adopting Ely’s approach may simply be to produce a further emboldened judiciary who, under the guise of advancing democracy, would then be freed from having to justify—by way of appealing to an (at least semi-legitimate) extra-Constitutional source—the substantive value judgments they inevitably must make but have claimed to forego. It is not hard to see how this could serve as a Trojan horse for judges’ personal predilections.

Those who criticize Ely’s theory as one that renders justices unable to check the tyranny of the majority, on the other hand, miss something key to the theory, the discussion of which leads to the appropriately final remarks of an article of this scope. Tyranny of the majority occurs when the majority exclusively pursues its own goals at the expense of politically weak minority groups. Ely’s theory expressly prohibits tyranny of the majority by assigning to the judiciary the role of guarding against acts of law which make it clear that the minority’s interests are not being taken seriously, in large part by prohibiting laws motivated by prejudice, which fall disproportionately heavily on minorities or decrease their prospects for meaningful political participation. An invidious law can be passed, but it will be an invidious law passed of, for, and by the people as a whole, and not apply disproportionately to minorities. And it is telling that, for Ely, the judiciary carries out this role in the name of representative democracy. This can only be implied to mean that Ely’s conception of representative democracy, as an ideal worth striving for, is not one of rank majoritarianism or of one faction oppressing another, but of a system in which equality of political opportunity and the dignity of its citizens are endogenous to the theory.

And this is revealing. It is generally thought that the American political system is a confluence of two great forms of government: representative democracy, which prioritizes the self-rule of the people via elected representatives, and constitutionalism, which emphasizes the necessity of protecting fundamental substantive rights (even if an electoral majority votes the other way). I suspect that Ely is not, as it might ostensibly seem, rejecting this characterizing framework, but rather precisely applying it insofar as the constitutional principles are internal to his conception of representative democracy to begin with. Ely’s theory, then, is not just that of a pure representative democrat, but also that of a constitutional democrat. The presence of this duality reinforces the inevitability of substantive value choices justices must make, again demonstrating that Ely’s argument, while intuitively attractive and useful to understand, is ultimately ineffective in its main aim of resolving the crucial dilemma initially posed.

The U.S. Criminal Justice System Needs to Start Treating Children Like Children

by Bianca Ortiz-Miskimen

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1 Prin.L.J.F. 1

On any given day, tens of thousands of incarcerated children are forced to eat, sleep, and learn in juvenile detention centers and adult prisons across the United States.

News stories of children being charged for harmless behaviors have become increasingly publicized, with examples ranging from not completing homework and participating in cafeteria food fights to stealing 25-cent candy. While there are child offenders who commit more serious crimes, they all deserve fair trials and sentences that take into account their young age.

Research from Stanford University shows that children have difficulty understanding the long-term consequences of their decisions and lack cognitive control during emotional situations. Experts also link moral conscience to the prefrontal cortex, which does not fully develop until adulthood and is often delayed in children who experience trauma as a result of being victimized early in life.

When a child is charged with a crime, a court will decide whether they will be tried as a child or an adult based largely on the severity of the crime. Those with less serious offenses are treated as children and have their cases heard by juvenile judges that have the power to remand them to a juvenile detention center while those treated as adults may be remanded to an adult prison with protective custody.

Meanwhile, parents of child offenders are forced to foot the bill for nightly housing in juvenile detention centers. Laws requiring these parental payments were meant to avoid burdening taxpayers and to encourage parents to keep their children out of trouble. However, the reality is that most of these parents are low-income and incapable of paying. Although some states have decided to end this practice, laws about charging parents are highly decentralized and can vary from county to county, creating large disparities.

To combat the stress of incarceration on young children and their parents, both New York and New Jersey have recently passed legislation to raise the age at which children may be tried in court as adults. However, the fact remains that in 22 states, there are no minimum age requirements for transferring a child into adult criminal courts, meaning that a child of any age in those states could end up in an adult prison for the rest of their life.

The U.S. Supreme Court has acknowledged the issue of excessive sentencing for child offenders in landmark cases Roper v. Simmons (2005) and Graham v. Florida (2009), in which the Court reversed decisions to impose the death penalty on a juvenile offender and to sentence a minor to life without parole for a non-homicidal offense, respectively. The Supreme Court opinions to reverse these prior holdings were made on the grounds that the childrens’ original sentences violated the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Rights for juvenile offenders were expanded further by the Supreme Court in Miller v. Alabama (2012) and Montgomery v. Louisiana (2016). In Miller v. Alabama, Miller appealed his sentence of life in prison without parole for a homicidal offense on the grounds that punishing a 14-year-old for the rest of his life was cruel and unusual. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court reversed his sentence, with the majority opinion concluding that life without parole is a disproportionate punishment for a juvenile, thus affirming that sentencing for child offenders must be treated as constitutionally different from adult offenders.

This decision was reaffirmed in Montgomery v. Louisiana, in which Miller v. Alabama was used as precedent to assert that sentencing schemes that impose mandatory life sentences onto juvenile offenders are unconstitutional. The Court held a 6-3 decision in favor of Montgomery, stating that the Miller decision applied retroactively to Montgomery’s case.

In the majority opinion, Justice Kennedy wrote, “In light of what this Court has said in Roper, Graham, and Miller about how children are constitutionally different from adults in their level of culpability, […] prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption; and, if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored.”

Montgomery, who is 73 years old but was just 17 years old at the time of his crime, is now eligible to be considered for parole. His case has also opened the door for other cases of child offender sentencing decisions to be re-evaluated based on this new standard. Thus far, Montgomery v. Louisiana has allowed more than 500 offenders to be released on parole.

However, the Supreme Court ought to recognize the capacity for rehabilitation of child offenders beyond the scope of life sentences. Even short stays in juvenile centers can have a profound negative impact on children due to harsh living conditions. For example, two juvenile correctional facilities in Wisconsin were recently hit with a class-action lawsuit in J.J. v. Litscher (2017) for keeping children in solitary confinement, spraying them with mace, and denying them therapeutic programs.

Confinement in juvenile centers has become particularly harmful during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused centers to cut visits from families and friends to prevent the spread of the virus, leaving thousands of incarcerated young people feeling extremely isolated.

Despite clear issues, some have argued that punishing minors will serve a positive long-term function by teaching children at a young age that their actions have consequences. The problem is that not all children are subject to the same punishments.

While white children make up the largest share of juvenile detainees in 45 of 50 states in the U.S. as of 2019, children of color — particularly African American children — are disproportionately represented in juvenile detention centers and are referred to juvenile courts at a higher rate than their white peers. This can be attributed to a number of factors, the most troubling of which include racial bias from judges and prosecutors.

In 2018, the Senate reauthorized the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Protection Act to update national standards on the judicial treatment of minors. The bill, introduced by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IO) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) aims to create restrictions on locking children up for statute offenses (eg. skipping school or running away from home), reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, and support alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders. Proposed alternatives include behavior management programs, problem-solving courts, street and home-based services, and drug abuse prevention and education services.

Experts in the fields of psychology and constitutional law have made steps towards affirming that children are not as capable as adults of understanding the consequences of their actions. Now, federal, state, and local laws must reflect this truth and discontinue practices that are overly punitive and insufficiently rehabilitative towards child offenders who cannot yet fully appreciate the weight of their transgressions.

It’s Not Just Me, It’s Also You: How Shared DNA Complicates Consent

by Ethan Magistro

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1 Prin.L.J.F. 19

With just a sample of your DNA, you, your immediate family members, and many other distant relatives can be identified. Your genetic information can be used to determine you and your families’ insurance policies, expose medical conditions you didn’t even know you had, and, in the worst case, be used to identify and arrest someone you may be distantly related to. The deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) contained within every cell of our bodies holds intimate details about each of us. Yet when users send sample DNA to direct-to-consumer (DTC) testing kit companies, only their consent is needed to share information that belongs to many of their family members. Because of this, I argue we should drastically rethink our understanding of DNA. Rather than conceptualizing DNA as analogous to other types of private property that can be traded with individual consent, DNA trade should require the shared consent of family members. The difficulty in obtaining that consent points to a colossal need for the development of genetic privacy laws.

To understand why DNA should be understood as a form of shared property, it will be helpful to outline the economic and legal landscape of consumer genetic testing. The past few years saw a spike in interest for DNA testing and an explosion in the DTC testing kit market, which is dominated by AncestryDNA and 23andMe. Although the market has died down since then, worries about political and enforcement abuses of genetic information and medical privacy concerns are still in focus.

Concerns about enforcement abuses of genetic information usually involve the Fourth Amendment, which protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures. This was exemplified in Maryland v. King, a U.S. Supreme Court case which held that genetic testing is similar to fingerprinting, and is therefore a reasonable search under the Fourth Amendment, to the chagrin of privacy advocates. The latter issue of medical privacy deals with Title I and II of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act Of 2008 (GINA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), both of which are notoriously lackluster in protecting privacy, especially regarding DTC testing, which neither law protects. Beyond this, some states have genetic privacy laws with varying levels of consent required by companies. Many of them provide little extra protection. This lack of privacy protection has caused the DTC industry to mostly self-regulate, which has been spotty at best: in their privacy policies, some genetic-testing companies wrongly claim they comply with HIPAA, while some companies have no privacy policies at all.

A lack of strong DNA privacy laws presents an imminent threat to genetic privacy because of how valuable a sample of DNA can be. Genetic information’s longevity, immutability (you cannot change your DNA like you can a lost password) and predictive ability about future health make it extremely valuable. Yet DNA is unique in that it is able to identify an individual as well as their family members, since people share large portions of DNA with their relatives. This is why it has been so often used to gain leads in criminal cases.

Being so valuable, it makes sense why shoddy privacy policies exploit a lack of laws to gain control of DNA. Deceptive policies mislead individuals to give away most of the control over genetic information, and, therefore, their family’s genetic information, without ever knowing it. With that control, companies can trade or exchange this data, often selling it to unknown third-party companies who can use it as they wish. Bigger companies like AncestryDNA or 23andMe are no safer. They may truthfully claim they do not sell your genetic data to third party companies, but the independent labs they send the sample to for analysis make no such guarantees.

It is hard for consumers to notice that. A large company’s connection to third parties is often inconspicuously snuck into their privacy policies. Before it was shut down in late 2020, AncestryHealth, the division of AncestryDNA designed to identify genetic health risks, sent DNA samples to a third-party group called PWNHealth for analysis. A link to PWN’s privacy policy is at the very end of AncestryDNA’s terms and conditions, which itself is in small print at the bottom of the AncestryDNA webpage. PWNHealth’s privacy policy is far less robust than Ancestry’s. Two points stick out:

“You have the right to request in writing that we restrict how your health information is used or disclosed. For most requests, under the law, we are not required to agree to your request.“

and

“If you request that Ancestry delete your information held by Ancestry, such request will not result in the deletion of information held by PWNHealth. Such information will be retained by PWNHealth in accordance with applicable law and this Privacy Policy.”

It is clear that PWNHealth has no intention of removing or restricting its use of submitted genetic data. Even if PWNHealth claims that they will only trade “non-identifiable data,” the shocking ease with which genetic data can be re-identified makes this claim essentially worthless. So while AncestryDNA will not sell your genetic data, PWNHealth can and will.

Despite all of these concerns, PWNHealth is still acting within the law so long as a user consents to its terms of use and, therefore, how it uses your genetic data. But is an individual’s consent enough considering that their DNA sample contains information about their relatives? It should not be. DNA contains valuable, identifiable information about a user’s family and distant relatives that should not be shared without their knowledge. Instead, companies who offer DTC genetic testing should require consent from those with whom an individual shares the majority of their DNA.

Already that idea sounds burdensome. Should someone really have to call their parents, grandparents, and siblings if they want to understand more about their own medical information? What about those who are estranged from their families, or people who are adopted and do not know their biological relatives? Here, a middle path exists between individual consent and shared consent. Perhaps for medical information, relevant to an individual who may want to alter their lifestyle to decrease the risk of a condition manifesting, an individual should use a DTC without providing shared consent. A kit designed to find unknown relatives who may wish to remain private, on the other hand, should require companies to ask for consent from those relatives.

Yet this argument ignores the threat that third-party actors pose. The importance of genetic privacy is less about keeping individual issues private from the family and more about keeping familial DNA out of the hands of third parties like PWNHealth who can trade that genetic information and other groups who could de-identify it or sell it. If you must get a genetic test for medical reasons, it would be wiser to do so in a clinical setting, where HIPAA and GINA offer comprehensive privacy and protection. Without that same protection, DTC tests put many of your relatives’ information at risk.

What could a stronger form of shared consent look like in the DTC arena? One analogy that provides some insight comes from a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Facebook in which the FTC challenged Facebook’s misleading privacy policies and deceptive practices. The complaint alleged that Facebook “told its users that they could limit those who could see their posts to just ‘Friends,’ when in reality—and without warning to the user—doing so would also allow developers of third-party applications used by their ‘Friends’ to access the post.” In other words, “third party applications” of a user’s Facebook friends could look at that user’s posts even if the user did not consent to that action.

This is not a perfect analogy. A post shared with a friend, which is then unwittingly shared with a third-party application, is not the same as DNA, which is physically shared by multiple people. Nonetheless, the FTC acted when Facebook gave third parties access to a user’s post, even when that user had no option to consent to this. In a case involving genetic data, it’s feasible that the FTC could challenge DTC companies for not adequately informing users that their familial genetic data, which they provided without their family’s consent, was now in third-party companies’ hands.

Like those users who had a reasonable expectation that only their friends would see their posts, people who have never taken a DNA test or given away a DNA sample would not expect their genetic information to be in the hands of a group such as PWNHealth. There is a reasonable expectation that genetic information is private. If someone wants to give away valuable information about you — even if it is partly their information too — they ought to seek out your consent.

Ultimately, the easiest remedy for the lack of genetic familial privacy and the need for shared consent would be stronger genetic privacy laws. The lack of robust genetic privacy laws already leaves consumers unprotected against bad actors looking to profit from their DNA. As genetic testing technology improves and we become able to gain more information from smaller samples of someone’s genome, not having ownership over your DNA could pose a threat to your descendants in the future. Technology that fails to respect these repercussions and ignores the need for consent from multiple parties cannot continue to outpace legislation. Although the complexity of shared consent and its complication of privacy policies leave room for the FTC to police weaker terms and conditions, it would be far more beneficial for all parties if strict regulation, created through legislation, protected the blueprint of life.

Tyranny of the Minority: The Unconstitutionality of the Filibuster

by Madeleine Polubinski

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1 Prin.L.J.F. 16

In recent years, congressional gridlock has focused national attention on the Senate’s filibuster. The filibuster is the process by which a minority of senators delay or prevent a vote on legislation by speaking as long as possible on the Senate floor, until three-fifths of the Senate invoke cloture, which moves the chamber to a vote. While the debate over the filibuster typically centers on its impact on governance, a different debate has been simmering among legal scholars for years: is the filibuster even constitutional? After all, the filibuster is not authorized in the Constitution, nor is it expressly prohibited. I argue that the filibuster in its original, purest sense is constitutional, but that is not the filibuster we have today. In its current form, the filibuster is unconstitutional because it disrupts the Senate’s legislative process as outlined in the Constitution and has feeble historical support.

The text of the Constitution and the history of Congress suggest that the filibuster as a debate-enhancing mechanism is constitutional. As legal scholar Michael Gerhardt argues, “the filibuster derives its principle authority from the Senate’s express power to design its own procedural rules to govern its internal affairs.” At its core, the filibuster regulates internal procedure, and thus the supermajority requirement for cloture is well within the Senate’s power.

Many scholars argue that cloture requirements reflect many of the principles underlying the Senate. Despite its potential for abuse, the filibuster, fundamentally a mechanism to continue debate, embodies the Senate’s deliberative nature. Although the Constitution makes no mention of a filibuster, the process has a long history dating back to 1806, which some argue proves its legitimacy. Furthermore, the filibuster may enhance protections of minority interests and promote consensus, producing more agreeable and thorough legislation.

However, the filibusters’ debate-promoting potential is inextricable from, and ultimately overshadowed by, its obstructionist implementation. For more than a century, senators have exploited cloture rules to stall Congress or block legislation altogether. Filibusters have become less about debate and more about grandstanding for media attention or simply killing time to stall a bill. After exhausting relevant topics, which are rarely genuine efforts for further deliberation, speeches often devolve into unrelated topics that range from discussions of salad dressing recipes to recitations of each states’ voting laws.

At best, today’s filibuster sees senators belaboring well-known objections to bills. At worst, it shuts down debate and stalls the Senate, delaying or blocking legislation. In an even more flagrant deviation from the filibusters’ supposed deliberative function, filibustering today usually does not even require debate. “Silent filibusters” allow senators to block legislation without debate by merely voicing their intent to filibuster. Silent filibusters are a complete perversion of the filibusters’ deliberative potential and prove that the process functions as nothing more than a three-fifths majority requirement for regular legislation.

When considering the filibuster as a supermajority requirement for regular legislation, it is clearly unconstitutional.² As a textual matter, the Constitution appoints the Vice President as the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, providing that they “shall have no Vote unless [the Senators] be equally divided.” This provision implies that the Senate must pass regular legislation by a majority vote. The Framers of the Constitution, while concerned with tyranny of the majority, generally favored majority rule except for certain cases. In fact, the specification of supermajority requirements in the Senate elsewhere in the Constitution, like for the ratification of treaties, indicates that the Framers never envisioned a supermajority rule for regular legislation.¹

The Framers, famously wary of tyranny of the majority, devised a system of governance to protect minority rights and promote deliberation without a filibuster. The Federalist Papers outline how checks and balances, federalism, and other structural mechanisms prevent abuses of power, suppression of minority interests, and rash government action. The Framers clearly feared tyrannical majorities and an overly powerful legislature. However, even they deemed a supermajority cloture requirement unnecessary, undermining the argument that the filibuster enhances the Senate’s intended function.

Furthermore, the filibuster lacks a firm historical foundation to support its constitutionality.³ A high-minded commitment to debate did not motivate the filibuster. Rather, the Senate accidentally opened the door for it in 1806 because they deemed the original debate-ending mechanism unnecessary. Even then, no Senator exploited this mistake until 1837, when rising partisanship fostered more obstructionist tactics.

Proponents of the filibuster claim that the Senate effectively affirmed the constitutionality of its cloture rules during every filibuster or cloture motion since the 1800s. However, the persistence of a practice does not legitimize it. This is especially true for a practice like the filibuster, which inherently impedes revision, violating “anti-entrenchment,” a principle that forbids a past legislature from binding a current legislature to a rule or practice it would otherwise reject.⁴ Because a supermajority is necessary to eliminate the supermajority requirement for cloture, a formal change to Senate rules is virtually impossible because minority senators have no incentive to cede their power.

While the filibuster is theoretically constitutional, its current usage violates the Constitution because its obstructionist function has overtaken its debate-enhancing potential. Rather than promoting debate, it effectively imposes an unconstitutional supermajority requirement on the Senate to pass virtually any piece of legislation. Ultimately, the filibuster’s problems have arisen out of its implementation. As political parties solidified and polarization increased, so did the incentives for politically motivated obstruction. If senators genuinely used the filibuster to continue productive debate and moved to a vote after sufficient discussion, it may pass constitutional muster. However, today’s divisive political climate and the long-standing violation of those standards make it impossible to return to old norms. Unless the Senate reforms the filibuster to curb its obstructionist implementation and restore its deliberative function, it must be abandoned on constitutional grounds.

¹ The three-fifths majority requirement only applies to regular legislation. The Senate can pass bills related to government spending and fiscal policy through the budget reconciliation process, which allows bills to pass with a simple majority. However, all legislation unrelated to the budget requires a supermajority because of the threat of a filibuster.

² More issues of constitutionality arise when the filibuster is used to prevent presidents from appointing officials and judges to certain positions. Because the Constitution grants this power of appointment to the President with “the Advice and Consent of the Senate” without specifying a supermajority requirement (as it does in other provisions), a filibuster that effectively imposes a supermajority requirement and hinders the President’s constitutionally defined power is likely unconstitutional. However, the filibuster for presidential nominees has already been eliminated, so this issue is moot.

³ While not central to the question of constitutionality, the filibuster’s history is ugly. Southern Senators repeatedly exploited the filibuster to preserve Jim Crow laws and block civil rights legislation. Far from protecting minority rights, the filibuster enabled a congressional minority to preserve a brutally racist system and prevent the mitigation of racial minorities’ oppression.

⁴ While the anti-entrenchment principle is not explicit in America’s founding documents, it impedes governance and is commonly invoked when discussing legislative procedure.

The Role of Environmental Personhood in Corporate Practices

by Anna Shin

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1 Prin.L.J.F. 13

Climate change has been at the forefront of environmental issues in both local communities and the global stage. The United Nations now labels climate change as a crisis that affects every country on every continent, and the problem only seems to be worsening by the year. While ordinary individuals can make small, everyday contributions in an effort to lower carbon emissions, much of the attention has been spotlighted on businesses and corporations, calling for them to adopt a “net zero emission” policy by either 2030 or 2050. While many large corporations such as Google and Microsoft have proclaimed their commitment to slashing carbon emissions, both environmental activist groups and the companies themselves have found that the actions to these large claims tend to fall short. Much of this inadequacy has been due to the lack of implementing rigorous, comprehensive standards for companies to reveal their true net emissions data.

There is a question as to whether corporations are lawfully bound to adopt sustainable practices at the expense of their own resources. Currently, the corporations, excluding their stockholders, are entitled to “corporate personhood” under the law, which defines corporations as able to enjoy and exercise some of the rights and privileges granted to individual people. Corporate personhood also suggests that corporations are defined as “persons” in the Fourteenth Amendment. This is what allows corporations to enter contracts, and also sue others or get sued themselves. The Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee (2010), which established that corporations were entitled to their First Amendment right of free speech in donating to political campaigns, has not been challenged to this day and therefore the statement that corporations are considered persons continues to stand.

Considering that corporations are considered as persons, the question of whether the environment, or Earth, is held to the same standard, persists. The concept of “earth jurisprudence,” or the belief that the Earth itself and all of its inhabitants have legal rights, has been used to argue that corporations that follow unsustainable or polluting practices are taking advantage of the Earth’s legal status. While earth jurisprudence has not officially been adopted into U.S. law, there has been much legal discourse on the issue of large corporations exploiting natural resources for profitability. Because the only witness to the Earth’s deterioration is the Earth itself, companies utilize this to silently engage in mass pollution and avoid many of the economic and societal ramifications.

The fact that U.S. courts view corporations as individuals comes at a cost. Unlike most individuals, large corporations enjoy the influence of money, power, and privilege. Corporations and businesses are built to work solely in favor of themselves and their profitability — establishing constitutionality to protect their interest-driven actions bears significant consequences for the protection of individual rights, and opens doors to corruption and special interests. The environment is one of the greatest victims of these influences, yet its very essence disallows it from seeking rightful protection. In addition to this, every business relies on the use of natural resources to advance its economic and industrial profits, either directly or indirectly. If the government and its laws fail to protect the Earth from misuse and destruction, it renders serious and irreversible damage for all its inhabitants. If the government recognizes nature as an individual and regulates eco-friendly business practices, it will not only benefit the environment, but also the corporation itself. Furthermore, the corporation will be setting itself up for long-term sustainability and profitability.

The country of Ecuador has already made progress in this issue. In 2008, Ecuador rewrote a portion of its Constitution by including a section called “Rights of Nature.” This acknowledges Earth as an individual and allows other people to bring lawsuits on behalf of it. If the United States were to adopt a similar legal doctrine, it would provide greater authority for the government to pursue environmental issues in higher rigor and reach.

Earth jurisprudence, although currently far from attaining the status it needs, must be carefully considered within the conversation of climate change as a whole. Without both the physical presence and well-being of the ecosystems we live in, other societal issues are essentially meaningless. It is by the efforts within the legal sphere to acknowledge Earth as an individual that humans will be able to protect the places we live in for the sake of future endeavors.

Affirmative Action Admissions Regimes are Unconstitutional: Strict Scrutiny Should Mean Something

by Myles McKnight and Benjamin Edelson

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1 Prin.L.J.F. 8

Harvard’s affirmative action saga continues, or so we hope. After losses in the Federal District Court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the non-profit group seeking to do away with Harvard’s race-obsessed admissions regime has filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in our Nation’s highest tribunal. Students for Fair Admissions petitions the Court to consider overruling Grutter v. Bollinger, the narrow 2003 decision which held that the University of Michigan Law School’s race-conscious admissions program was constitutional because it satisfied strict scrutiny. Grutter’s loose reasoning leads us to think that the Court should overrule, so we’ll canvass just one reason for believing so here.

Whatever you make of the merits of Harvard’s affirmative action program, there are constitutional questions that lurk beneath the operation of any state-sponsored policy which prescribes differential treatment on the basis of race. No one denies this. Policy is one thing, constitutionality another. And when government policy (or the policy of institutions that receive government funding, like Harvard) makes racial classifications, reviewing courts must apply the test of strict scrutiny to determine whether or not those policies meet constitutional muster.¹ For the unfamiliar: A race-conscious policy satisfies strict scrutiny if it 1) furthers a compelling (i.e. necessary) state interest, and 2) is “narrowly tailored” such that the policy minimizes, to the extent possible, differential treatment on the basis of race. If a policy discriminates on the basis of race only to the degree necessary to meet a compelling interest, it stands the test of strict scrutiny.

Harvard argues that its policy meets this standard. We think that’s wrong. In fact, we don’t think an affirmative action regime like Harvard’s can ever satisfy strict scrutiny for reasons we’ll present below. But first, some preliminaries.

The compelling interest claimed by the law school in Grutter was the procurement of the educational benefits that stem from having adequately diverse classrooms (what Justice Thomas calls “classroom aesthetics”).² In fact, of the interests historically offered as justifications for affirmative action admissions practices, the Court has held that this is the only one that can be compelling.³ Before turning to whether or not this interest actually is compelling, we should point out that there is serious reason to doubt that this interest is truly the one that animates affirmative action policies like Harvard’s.

Let’s grant, for a moment, that the end to which the policy is tailored is the procurement of the educational benefits that stem from classroom diversity. (The alleged compelling interest is not racial diversity qua racial diversity, but rather the educational benefits that stem from that diversity).

Why limit the diversity to racial diversity? If the interest in the educational benefits that stem from racial diversity is indeed compelling, presumably there are other forms of diversity that would produce similarly significant, and similarly valuable, educational benefits. And those would be compelling too, right?⁴

We can, in fact, think of other diversity domains wherein composition shifts would shock the academic status quo at elite universities just as much as or even more than adjustments in racial composition, thereby providing educational benefits at least as tangible and significant. Here are a few: political, ideological, and religious diversity among professors and students. Nevertheless, it is no secret that evangelical Christians and conservatives go dramatically underrepresented at institutions like Harvard or, say, Princeton. Can it really be that the educational benefits that stem from racial diversity are compelling interests while the educational benefits that stem from political, ideological, and religious diversity are not? Indeed, in the context of academe, where the cause of truth-seeking through academic discourse is advanced, one would think that the most prized form of diversity would be ideological. There can be little doubt that healthy ideological diversity would have at least as tangible an impact on the ability of students to navigate an ideologically, racially, and religiously diverse world as racial diversity would.

All of this should give us real pause before buying into the notion that the educational benefits that stem from racial diversity are the real interests at play. To us, it seems more plausible that the interest is something akin to the following: the rectification of societal ills and tragedies of minority underrepresentation. We think that this is a laudable interest, but it is not the one once alleged by the University of Michigan Law School or the one alleged by Harvard today. Moreover, the fulfillment of this specific interest by affirmative action was explicitly thrown away by Justice Powell in Bakke.

If you disagree with us so far, you might be tempted to respond: “Ah, well, conservatives and evangelicals are not historically marginalized groups. It’s wrong to analogize intellectual and religious diversity to racial diversity in this way!” Well, you’ve proved our point: Your interest lies in the rectification of historic societal ills.

Let’s leave this aside. As a matter of fact, we do have reason to conclude that the asserted interest of procuring educational benefits is not the one that the Court should evaluate here. This is because the phrase “educational benefits that flow from racial diversity” is actually a gross misstatement of the more precise interest motivating Harvard’s scheme. We construe it as follows: the procurement of the educational benefits that stem from racial diversity, consistent with the maintenance of prestige and the general standards of the institution.

In our view, that second clause (“…prestige and general standards of the institution”) is a necessary component of the true interest to be weighed. Before explaining why this is the case, we should first take care to note that the maintenance of institutional prestige couldn’t possibly be a compelling interest. The compelling interest doctrine, as applied to race-conscious policies, provides the courts with a mechanism to smoke out illegitimate racial differentiation in all but situations of total necessity; “compelling” does not mean “preferable” or “laudable.” As historically applied to race-conscious policies, strict scrutiny has rejected interests even as important as the “best interests” of children. Race-conscious policies have otherwise typically stood only when they serve interests of such immense necessity as national security, the functionality of government, and safety from violence.⁵ In any case, should you prefer a looser conception of “compelling interest” than we do, it’s still immensely difficult to see how the maintenance of institutional prestige could ever rise to the qualification of compulsory. To quote Justice Scalia: “If that is a compelling state interest, everything is.”

So, if we’re correct in construing the relevant interest as we do, an affirmative action scheme like Harvard’s cannot pass the test of strict scrutiny. And if that is the case, it is unconstitutional. So, why are we correct?

Suppose you were devising an admissions scheme designed to secure the educational benefits that stem from classroom diversity. You’re not interested in prestige or maintaining the “high standards” for admission that make your university so elite – you know that those interests couldn’t be compelling. So, how do you do it? Your policy will need to be narrowly tailored, meaning it will have to be as race-neutral as possible while still increasing the diversity of your classrooms. If your interest lies only in the educational benefits that flow from increased racial diversity, perhaps you’ll come up with a lottery system so that your admitted class will be more reflective of a diverse applicant pool. Or, maybe you’ll adopt an approach to evaluating applications that gives less weight across the board to factors that, on average, tend to cut against the admissions chances of disadvantaged minority students (e.g. SAT scores). This would substantially reduce the disadvantage faced by applicants from historically marginalized communities. Because reduced consideration of such factors would apply to all applicants, you might not have to consider racial background at all.

But instead, you opt for a scheme that deliberately favors applicants from some minority groups by applying different standards of admission to students on the basis of their racial identities.⁶ Anyone can see that that scheme is not narrowly tailored to the interest in the way that the aforementioned alternatives might be; there are more race-neutral ways to attain sufficient classroom diversity than this scheme. Indeed, such a race-conscious admissions scheme can only be narrowly tailored if the interest itself is adjusted to accommodate the claim of narrow tailoring. Thus, an affirmative action admissions regime like Harvard’s, which applies different standards to different races in order to produce classroom diversity without sacrificing any degree of prestige, is only narrowly tailored in the context of an interest which includes the maintenance of the prestige secured by exclusive admission standards. And the interest in prestige and exclusivity, as we have suggested, cannot be compelling.

Importantly, we haven’t passed judgment on the policy merits of affirmative action. We believe that the rectification of societal ills and tragedies of minority underrepresentation are important and laudable interests. They are, moreover, perfectly constitutional interests. However, this does not mean that the Constitution gives wide latitude to policymakers who wish to realize these aspirations by devising policies that prescribe differential treatment between races. Rather, our Nation’s reckoning with its painful history of racial discrimination has led to the application of a rigorous legal safeguard designed to smoke out all but the most indispensable considerations of race. That safeguard is strict scrutiny. For a policy that discriminates between individuals on the basis of race to survive a constitutional challenge, it must do battle with strict scrutiny. The sort of policy we address here loses that battle.

¹ Adarand v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995)

² Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306, 123 S. Ct. 2325 (2003)

³ See Justice Powell’s opinion in Bakke. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)

⁴ It’s true that many schools, including Harvard, consider certain other forms of diversity during the admissions process (Harvard also considers geographic diversity, for example).

⁵ From Justice Thomas in Grutter: “Where the Court has accepted only national security, and rejected even the best interests of a child, as a justification for racial discrimination, I conclude that only those measures the State must take to provide a bulwark against anarchy, or to prevent violence, will constitute a ‘pressing public necessity.’ Cf. Lee v. Washington, 390 U. S. 333, 334 (1968) (per curiam) (Black, J., concurring) (indicating that protecting prisoners from violence might justify narrowly tailored racial discrimination); Croson, supra, at 521 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).”

⁶ That this is the mechanism by which affirmative action policies achieve their ends is not a subject of debate.

This article was edited on April 27, 2021.