Description

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A timely defense of affirmative action policies that offers a more nuanced understanding of how centuries of invidious racism, discrimination, and segregation in the United States led to and justifies such policies from both a moral and constitutional perspective.

Since 1961, the issue of "affirmative action" has been a hotly contested legal and political issue. Intended to address our nation's often horrifying discrimination against Black Americans and other minorities, affirmative action has led over the past sixty years to far greater minority representation across a vast range of industries, government positions, and academic institutions. Nonetheless, affirmative action policies in the United States continue to fall under assault.

In A Legacy of Discrimination, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, two of America's leading constitutional scholars, trace the policy's history and the legal challenges it has faced over the decades. They argue that in order to fully comprehend affirmative action's original intent and impact, we must re-acquaint ourselves with the era in which it arose, beginning with the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, 1954's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Assessing this history, Bollinger and Stone introduce subsequent, and evolving, affirmative-action case law that had the intent and effect of constraining social, educational, and economic progress for Black people and other minority groups. They demonstrate how and why affirmative action policies stand on firm legal ground and must remain protected. Further, they explain why Americans must view affirmative action as a long-term moral commitment to secure justice, especially for Black Americans, after three and a half centuries of grave injustice that violates the most essential aspirations of our nation.

A timely and robust overview of the history of our nation's historical and continuing racial discrimination and of the advent of affirmative action as a critical means to address this history, this book will serve as a powerful defense of a policy that has accomplished more than most people realize in making America a fairer and more inclusive country.

About the Author

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Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University's 19th president in 2002 and is the longest serving Ivy League president. He is Columbia's first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Law School faculty, and one of the nation's foremost First Amendment scholars. Bollinger's books include: Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide Open: A Free Press for a New Century; Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era; Images of a Free Press; and The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America. And, his books co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone include The Free Speech Century and National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press. Bollinger serves as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. As president of the University of Michigan, Bollinger led the school's landmark civil rights litigation in Grutter v. Bollinger, a Supreme Court decision that for the first time upheld the constitutional right of colleges and universities to engage in affirmative action to advance diversity in higher education. Bollinger is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and the recipient of ten honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the National Humanitarian Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice and the National Equal Justice Award from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Mr. Stone earned his J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School in 1971, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of The University of Chicago Law Review. After serving as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Stone joined the faculty of The University of Chicago Law School in 1973. Mr. Stone has served as Dean of The University of Chicago Law School (1987-1994) and Provost of The University of Chicago (1994-2002). Mr. Stone is the author or co-author of many books on constitutional law. Among them are Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court (2020), The Free Speech Century (2018) co-authored with Columbia University President Lee Bollinger; Sex and the Constitution (2017); Top Secret: When Government Keeps Us In the Dark (2007); and Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004), which received eight national book awards. Mr. Stone is the co-editor of one of the nation's leading constitutional law casebooks, chief editor of a twenty-volume series, Inalienable Rights, which is published by the Oxford University Press, and an editor of the Supreme Court Review.