Has the Roberts Court Plurality\u27s Colorblind Rhetoric Finally Broken \u3cem\u3eBrown\u27s\u3c/em\u3e Promise?

This Essay examines the continuing significance of the Keyes decision to the judicial vision of equality and racial isolation in public education. By comparing efforts to promote educational equality from the Keyes era through today, this Essay asserts that the judiciary has wrongly embraced a colorblind interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause. In so doing, courts have impeded the progress of children in Denver and around the country, ignored highly instructive social science studies on the benefits of desegregation, and broken the constitutional promise of equal citizenship. For future policy makers and lawyers to address these persistent problems, legal educators must equip students with tools to reclaim legal conversations about freedom and equaltiy. The author, Dean Phoebe A. Haddon of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, concludes with recollections of her late aunt, Rachel B. Noel, who played an instrumental part in the evolution of the Keyes case

Education for a Public Calling in the 21st Century

A decade ago, an issue of the Association of American Law Schools\u27 Journal of Legal Education was devoted to ruminations on selecting lawyers for the twenty-first century. Although some of the papers in the Journal issue offered congratulatory messages to legal educators and the Law School Admissions Council for their work, others more critically assessed legal education and the admissions process, warning of an impending mid-life crisis caused in part by an unreflective period of maturation. Focusing on two decades of applicant explosion, affording the conscious creation of a more intellectually elite profession, \u27 a number of the authors who submitted papers wondered whether law schools and law faculty had acted responsibly in exercising their monopolistic power to determine who will be able to practice law and what will be taught. The collection of Journal articles generally reflected a self-conscious recognition that not only the test-taking process of identifying who enters law school, but also who teaches and how we teach deserved deeper introspection. One commentator—a nonlawyer—posed a question ripe for contemplation at that time: What is a good lawyer

Does \u3cem\u3e Grutter \u3c/em\u3e Offer Courts an Opportunity to Consider Race in Jury Selection and Decisions Related to Promoting Fairness in the Deliberation Process?

This essay considers whether the two recent Supreme Court affirmative action cases, the Michigan law school and undergraduate cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, provide support for opening the process of jury selection and deliberation to more fully include people of color and other under-represented groups and their experiences. I shall argue that these recent affirmative action cases can provide some support for ensuring better representation of people of color in the jury selection process, challenging the pre-textual use of peremptories and opening opportunities to talk about race during trials. The Court\u27s reasoning in Grutter that diversity is a value that a law school can appropriately promote when it considers the admissions qualifications of candidates could lead the Court similarly to sustain limited race-conscious efforts to assure a process of inclusion in jury selection and in steps leading up to and including deliberation. Grutter opens the possibility for persons concerned about improving the justice system to be able to persuade courts to develop more effective ways to inlcude our richly diverse citizenry in the jury system