I wonder if Charles E. Daye didn’t just pull a huge prank on the Supreme Court or an outfit called the Law School Admission Council.
Last year Daye was a co-signer on the brief filed by the UNC law school (a .pdf copy of which is available here) before the U.S. Supreme Court for the case of Grutter v. Michigan, in which he and others argued definitively (see note) that there is an educational benefit to racial diversity in the classroom. It was an argument that the Court found persuasive, but only for the next quarter century.
Now Daye and a few other scholars have been allotted a grant by the Law School Admission Council “to answer the question: ‘Does diversity offer educational benefits?’”
And here I thought Daye answered that question rather strongly in the affirmative before the nation’s highest court. Would the Justices have ruled differently if they knew that answer was in doubt at UNC after all?
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NOTE
For example, Daye et al. wrote the following (emphasis added): “We as amicus, drawing upon over three decades of experience as law teachers, scholars, and administrators, know and confirm that racially diverse law schools deepen legal study and enrich student understanding of the law. Joining thousands of other academic and administrative officials, then, we fully endorse both the empirical assumptions that underlay Justice Powell?s opinion in Bakke as well as its legal conclusion, which affirmed the careful use of race as ‘a plus factor’ in university admissions.”
