The experience of Rice provides a preview of the subtle ways that life would most likely change inside the admissions offices of colleges like Yale, Princeton and Stanford should the Supreme Court decide to impose strict restrictions on affirmative action.
Then, by a 5-to-4 vote, the justices set strict limits on federal affirmative action programs, ruling that such programs must be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest.
In this paper, corresponding to a May cooperative system, we give a strict proof of an affirmative answer which is without any conditions.
Justice Powell shaped a classic transitional decision that said that affirmative action plans pass strict scrutiny (and are constitutional) only when race would be a factor in the admissions process, and not the entire selection factor (i.e. quotas).
As Adarand Constructors v. Peña, the case led in 1995 to a landmark Supreme Court decision that for the first time applied to federal affirmative action programs the same "strict scrutiny" the court had earlier applied to state and local programs.
Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which the court heard earlier in December, is the second time the university's affirmative action program has faced strict scrutiny from the court.
Starting in 1995, though, with Adarand Constructors v. Pena, the Court, in an opinion by Sandra Day O'Connor, began applying "strict scrutiny" to laws that favor racial minorities — viewing affirmative action, in effect, as a form of racial discrimination.
That's why the Supreme Court has insisted that any affirmative action plan must meet the test of "strict scrutiny" — that is, that the plan must be "narrowly tailored" to serve a "compelling interest".
The New York Post, for example, known for its rabid opposition to affirmative action quotas -- and in favor of strict color-blindness on the part of government -- nevertheless backs NYPD's racial profiling.
Brazil has never had anything like the Ku Klux Klan, or the ban on interracial marriage imposed in 17 American states until 1967.Importing American-style affirmative action risks forcing Brazilians to place themselves in strict racial categories rather than somewhere along a spectrum, says Peter Fry, a British-born, naturalised-Brazilian anthropologist.
