COLLEGE'S RACE POLICY BACKED
ROBERT A. FRAHM; Courant Staff WriterTHE HARTFORD COURANT
Black law students at Yale, Harvard and Stanford universities will file a legal brief in the U.S. Supreme Court today supporting the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action program.
The court is scheduled to hear arguments in the spring in two cases seeking to prohibit Michigan from considering race as a factor in admissions decisions in its law school and undergraduate programs.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, the Black Law Students associations at Yale, Harvard and Stanford contend that Michigan has a compelling interest in using affirmative action to build a student body of various races and backgrounds.
The loss of affirmative action would be especially damaging at the nation's most prestigious law schools, which serve as gateways to positions of power in the legal and political arena, the brief contends.
"At the very top schools, at least among African Americans, the numbers would certainly diminish," Travis LeBlanc, a third-year law student at Yale, said Monday by phone from the New Haven campus.
LeBlanc, 25, who is also a public policy graduate student at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, said the Supreme Court itself is an example of the influence of the nation's top schools, with eight of the nine justices having attended law school at Yale, Harvard or Stanford.
LeBlanc compared the affirmative action case to other landmark Supreme Court civil rights cases, including the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, which declared racial segregration in public schools illegal; and the Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke decision in 1978, which allowed colleges to give some consideration to race in college admissions.
"It's only every 25 years or so the Supreme Court considers race in education," LeBlanc said. "It's more important than ever that anyone who has a stake in this case speaks up."
In a press release, Harvard law student Troy Brown said that race-conscious admissions policies "help create an environment where racial stereotypes and prejudices are challenged and where students learn to work together, debate one another and understand each other."
Today is the deadline for the University of Michigan and its supporters to file briefs.
The two cases -- Grutter vs. Bollinger and Gratz vs. Bollinger -- were filed on behalf of white students who were denied admission to Michigan's law school and its main undergraduate program.
Last month, the Bush administration filed briefs urging the Supreme Court to rule against Michigan's affirmative action policies. The briefs, filed by the Justice Department, contend that the Michigan policies unfairly burden white applicants and place a disproportionate emphasis on race.