The Fall of Affirmative Action

Dear Reader,

In the summer of 2023, the United States Supreme Court departed from half a century of its prior jurisprudence and ruled that universities could not take race into account in admissions decisions. The decision wiped out affirmative action policies that the most selective universities had adopted in order to create more racially integrated student bodies; as a result of the decision, at many universities the presence of Black and Latino students has dropped dramatically. The decision presaged the Trump Administration’s all-out assault on a wide range of policies meant to produce racial progress.

Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School, takes the Supreme Court decision very seriously. In The Fall of Affirmative Action, he relentlessly scrutinizes, and challenges, its reasoning. Even before the 2023 decision, he argues, the debate over affirmative action had been forced onto an absurdly narrow set of considerations that ruled out the most obvious rationale for it: correcting the highly racialized past—and present—of American society. 

Although Driver is passionately critical of the decision, he in no way advocates that universities not comply. Instead he sketches out in detail a variety of possible ways to challenge the decision: by turning its own logic against it, by using loopholes it has left open, and by making new and different arguments for affirmative action than the ones its liberal supporters have been using for decades.

Many American institutions have reacted to the current moment by withdrawing from their longstanding commitments to racial justice. This book takes the opposite approach. It is a powerful argument for fighting back.

Sincerely,

Nicholas Lemann
Director, Columbia Global Reports