Minorities clamored for their own identity-group housing and ethnic studies. As an expert witness in the case, he argued that a “critical mass” was necessary to ensure that minorities did not feel isolated or tokenized, and that nonminority students heard their diverse voices.īut O’Connor worried that affirmative action, which had succeeded at increasing the numbers of minorities at top schools, had hardly put an end to identity politics. She was also influenced by an argument made by Kent Syverud. Read: Elite-college admissions are broken The military-indeed, all major institutions-needed to look like society at large, or so O’Connor was convinced. It argued that affirmative action was necessary to keep a racial gap from yawning in the ranks. O’Connor was also moved by a friend-of-the-court brief signed by a raft of top military officers, including General Colin Powell and a number of former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. senators are lawyers.) If African Americans had to compete solely on tests scores, few would be in top law schools. She couldn’t accept the effect on elite institutions.” O’Connor believed that law schools were training grounds for future leaders. “It showed a steep drop-off in minorities. “That’s what got to her,” said a third law clerk, Cristina Rodriguez. One included a chart showing the impact on California public universities after a state referendum abolished affirmative action. Dozens of legal briefs in the case were stacked high in her office. The Michigan case “loomed” over O’Connor’s chambers, recalled another clerk, Emily Henn. Justin Nelson, one of O’Connor’s clerks, recalled, “She pulled me over and said, ‘This is going to come down to me.’” She understood that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court’s other swing vote, would go with the conservatives. She knew she was alone in the middle, with the four liberals (Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John Paul Stevens) on one side in favor of affirmative action, and the conservatives (Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas) dead set against. O’Connor did not embrace her role as the decisive vote on affirmative action in the Grutter case. As a practical matter, very few black students were among the law-review editors at top law schools, who generally make up the Supreme Court clerk hiring pool. She hired men and women in roughly equal numbers, but over her 25 years on the Court, only about 3 percent of her law clerks were African American. As a justice hiring law clerks, O’Connor in theory welcomed diversity of all kinds. She knew what it was like to be the victim of discrimination-even though she graduated near the top of her class at Stanford Law in 1952, she could not persuade a single California law firm to consider her for a lawyer’s job. Once, during the Court’s weekly private conference, when Justice Antonin Scalia was declaiming against racial and gender preference, O’Connor drily remarked, “Why Nino, how do you think I got my job?” O’Connor was a realist and pragmatist, in life and in her jurisprudence. O’Connor was herself the beneficiary of affirmative action. Kimberly Reyes: Affirmative action shouldn’t be about diversity But O’Connor’s struggles over this difficult issue illuminate why it will not be easy to stop the consideration of race in admissions at publicly funded institutions. With O’Connor long gone from the bench (she retired in 2006) and a conservative majority solidifying on the Court, the conventional wisdom has become that racial preference is doomed in higher education. (By coincidence, the case involved the University of Michigan Law School.) As another one of her former law clerks, Andrew McBride, put it to me, “She didn’t like affirmative action, though she was the one to save it.” Bollinger, a precedent that still stands. But she cast the decisive vote to uphold affirmative action in higher education in a 2003 case, Grutter v. Indeed, as a Goldwater Republican appointed to the Court by Ronald Reagan, she wrote the majority opinion striking down quota-like “set asides” for minority contractors by the city of Richmond in the Croson case in 1989, and for federal minority contractors in the Adarand case in 1995. O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court justice, might have seemed like a natural candidate to vote against racial preferences in university admissions. This essay was adapted from First: Sandra Day O’Connor, by Evan Thomas.
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