A Black and White Case: How Affirmative Action Survived Its Greatest Legal Challenge

From Publishers Weekly
Stohr, Bloomberg News's Supreme Court reporter, offers a balanced chronicle of the hotly contested, headline-making litigation brought to prevent the University of Michigan and its law school from using affirmative action in their admissions processes. The conservative Center for Individual Rights brought a constitutional test case by recruiting rejected white applicants (who had higher grades and test scores than admitted blacks) as plaintiffs and filing complaints in late 1997. Stohr follows the unfolding lawsuit step by step, from trial court to appeals court to the Supreme Court, which in 2003 rejected outright numerical advantages for minority applicants, but permitted the university to assemble a diverse class of students containing a "critical mass" of minorities. Throughout, Stohr pays attention to the participants—the plaintiffs, defendants, lawyers and judges—explaining their backgrounds and their stances on affirmative action, and sets out the issues in simple language. Stohr spotlights one fascinating feature of the case: the role of scores of amicus ("friend of the court") briefs filed on both sides. Amicus briefs from the military services, for instance, supported affirmative action, arguing that diversity at military academies is a matter of national security. As Stohr concludes, the Supreme Court assured that "[r]ace-based admissions would be around for at least another generation." 29 b&w photos. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Stohr, a legal reporter, provides a detailed look at the University of Michigan law school affirmative-action program, recently upheld by a slim margin by the U.S. Supreme Court. Stohr covered all sides of this contentious issue: rejected white students whose test scores exceeded those of some black students who were admitted, the philosophy professor who took the university to task for its consideration of race, and the law school dean (who later became the university president) who strongly supports affirmative action in admissions nationally. Beyond the Michigan campus, Stohr talked to members of a conservative legal think tank that had previously targeted racial preferences in admissions to universities in some southern states. As legal representatives stake out their turf, Stohr examines the fundamental constitutional questions and reflects on the significance of the tight Supreme Court ruling--four in support, four in opposition. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, increasingly leaning toward the middle, carried the day, but the split exemplifies the continued tension surrounding racial issues in the U.S. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Debra Dickerson, author of The End of Blackness and An American Story
An engrossing, thought-provoking, fast-paced read...thoroughly and even-handedly captures both sides of an epic legal struggle.


David Savage, Supreme Court reporter for the Los Angeles Times
A full, fair, and scrupulously balanced account.


Erwin Chemerinsky, Alston & Bird Professor of Law, Duke Law School
A fascinating and compelling account of landmark cases on an issue of enormous importance in American society.


Douglas W. Kmiec, Chair and Professor of Constitutional Law, Pepperdine University
Greg Stohr's book supplies a valuable chronicle for the national discussion that necessarily continues.


William M. Shain, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Vanderbilt University
Truly a page-turner, immensely readable, engaging in human terms, and well informed.


St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 2004
"Stohr has produced a brisk yet meaty book that establishes him as a first-rate legal journalist. Move over, Jeffrey Toobin."


Book Description
In the late 1990s, two lawsuits by white applicants who had been rejected by the University of Michigan began working their way through the federal court system, aimed at the abolition of racial preferences in college admissions. The stakes were high, the constitutional questions profound, the politics and emotions explosive. It was soon evident that the matter was headed for the highest court in the land, but there all clarity ended. To the plaintiffs and the feisty public-interest law firm that backed them, the suits were long overdue. Discrimination under any guise was not only illegal, it was the wrong way to set history right in a nation that had been troubled and divided by the uses and misuses of race for more than two hundred years. To the University of Michigan and other top institutions, it looked as if affirmative action policies that had ensured campus diversity for decades were about to be overturned. Black and Hispanic students were in danger of being once again largely shut out of the most important avenue of advancement in America, an elite education. In A Black and White Case, veteran Supreme Court reporter Greg Stohr portrays the individual dramas and exposes the human passions that colored and propelled this momentous legal struggle. His fascinating account takes us deep inside America's court system, where logic collides with emotion, and common sense must contend with the majesty and sometimes the seeming perversity of the law. He follows the trail from Michigan to Washington, D.C., revealing how lawyers argued and strategized, how lower-court judges fought behind the scenes for control of the cases, and why the White House filed a brief in support of the white students. Finally, Stohr details the fallout from the Supreme Court's controversial 2003 ruling that both upheld affirmative action and upended some of the methods that had been used to effect it. And he shows how colleges and universities are reshaping their affirmative action policies—an evolution closely watched by lower courts, employers, civil rights lawyers, legislators, regulators, and the public. A Black and White Case brings alive and brilliantly explains one of the most important Supreme Court decisions on the fundamental and divisive subject of race relations in America.


About the Author
Greg Stohr has been the Bloomberg News Supreme Court reporter since 1998. A former judicial clerk and Congressional and campaign press secretary, he graduated with honors from Harvard Law School in 1995. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and two children.


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Affirmative action policies are government or institutional efforts to end forms of discrimination against minorities; and challenges to, or acceptance of, those policies are critical social issues in American society. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two University of Michigan cases-Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger-concerning racial preferences in their admission policies for undergraduate and law school. Stohr, a Bloomberg News U.S. Supreme Court reporter, emphasizes the strategies of opposing litigating parties in developing their arguments. Special attention is paid to the judges' conflicts at the U.S. Court of Appeals and how the parties built coalitions to obtain friend-of-court briefs at the U.S. Supreme Court in these socially and politically charged cases. Stohr shows key elements in the justices' assessment of the value of racial diversity on college campuses, but he does not explore strategic activities among the justices in either case; nor does he examine how the U.S. Supreme Court is central to deciding these emotional issues in the American political system. Recommended for public libraries for its understanding of a key social issue and the U.S. Supreme Court.-Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.


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