Disconnects in the Law Review "Affirmative Action" Discussion

All the notional ink spilled in the past week on the question of whether law reviews ought to self-consciously select articles with a thumb on the scales of particular identity traits has certainly been interesting. The discussions have been interesting, and so has the amount of energy spent on it. I have little to add on the main subject, largely because I am still undecided about precisely how small the stakes are.

But I would like to make one observation. It seems to me that, in a sense, the arguments in favor of allowing law reviews to engage in this kind of activity actually end up with two very different implications, and not especially welcome ones for those making these arguments. On one reading, those arguments end up suggesting that there are good reasons why public law schools' law reviews cannot legally do so. On another, perhaps more puckish reading, the arguments in favor of "affirmative action" by law reviews amount to arguments against the constitutionality of affirmative action altogether, at least under current doctrine. Of course some generalizations follow. I think they're supportable ones, but they're not meant as definitive, so much as they're meant to make us ask what this smaller debate says about the larger issue.

Several things strike me as common features in contemporary arguments for the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions in the university context. 1) Largely because the Supreme Court requires it, it is routinely argued that such admissions programs involve a careful, holistic, nuanced, all-things-considered consideration that takes full account of the merits of each applicant and takes more than just race into account for diversity purposes. 2) For a variety of reasons, offices of affirmative action, diversity management, etc., both inside and outside of universities, routinely argue that their job is a complex one that requires a good deal of expertise and experience. 3) For both reasons, as well as for reasons relating to academic freedom, defenders of race-conscious university admissions argue that both the need for and the execution of such programs requires expert judgments of the kind that courts are ill-suited to make, and that courts therefore ought to afford universities substantial deference in this area.

Now contrast that with some of the arguments in the past week suggesting that law reviews, presumably including public university law reviews, are entitled to and perhaps ought to engage in article selection in part based on particular identity traits of the authors, including race. The arguments have been interesting and sometimes persuasive. But they still involve a brute bottom-line conclusion: that sorting according to identity trait (including race) can be undertaken by a bunch of 24-year-olds, who have at most a year's experience as journal editors and who, most people seem to agree, are not even qualified to judge the merits, such as they are, of the articles they are reading.

To the extent that it is true that journal editors are young and inexperienced--not to mention busy with a full load of coursework--I find it hard to imagine that anything they do would fall within the kinds of parameters that have led courts to defer to and permit race-conscious actions by other sectors of public universities. (Of course, it may be that the law reviews' actions fall outside the legal scope of any 14th Amendment prohibitions, if only because the law should not concern itself with trifles and law reviews are just that.)

Understandably, I haven't seen any suggestion, from defenders of law review editors engaging in this kind of authorial sorting, that those editors are simply unqualified to engage in what everyone has been calling "affirmative action." They seem to assume they are competent to do so. That leads me to my second, somewhat more provocative question. To the extent that they, or anyone else, think that law review editors are qualified to do so, and draw on broader arguments about race-conscious university admissions in talking about what law reviews might be doing or ought to do, shouldn't that lead us to doubt all the claims concerning complexity, expertise, holistic consideration, and so on that are made on behalf of public universities? Shouldn't it lead us to wonder whether any deference at all is warranted on the part of courts toward those universities? And if universities didn't receive that kind of deference, isn't it much more likely that race-conscious policies by universities would be struck down altogether? In short, if, for God knows what reason, the Supreme Court justices are sitting in Washington, taking a break from working on their opinions in the Fisher case to read the blog arguments in favor of affirmative action in law review article selection, shouldn't they conclude that Grutter v. Bollinger ought to be overruled?

Just a thought.