Law in Contemporary Society

View   r4  >  r3  ...
AlexWangFirstPaper 4 - 18 Jun 2012 - Main.AlexWang
Line: 1 to 1
 
META TOPICPARENT name="FirstPaper"
Deleted:
<
<
 

Legal Standards

Line: 122 to 121
 Perhaps greater efficiency benefits could pass heightened scrutiny at all. The Court held in Reed and reaffirmed in Frontiero and Craig that administrative convenience is not a sufficient justification to withstand heightened scrutiny. High costs in shifting to a non-discriminatory system are not enough to justify discrimination based on a suspect or quasi-suspect classification. The question is whether there is any difference between reducing costs and increasing productivity. Fundamentally, both affect the bottom line. It could be argued that Reed and Frontiero stand for the proposition that the government cannot fail to remedy discrimination just because the remedy is costly. If this is true, surely the government cannot discriminate to generate profits.

It seems unlikely that the cost-effectiveness of affirmative action is enough to independently justify the program. However, it may help to further support diversity as a compelling government interest. Specifically, cost-effectiveness may show that affirmative action programs are more narrowly tailored than previously thought. The dissents in Grutter advocate percentage plans like those used in California and Texas because they produce similar student body diversity. These plans, however, would not increase the overall level of productivity they are based solely on the existing level of competition. Affirmative action, then, would be less replaceable and thus more narrowly tailored. \ No newline at end of file

Added:
>
>

*************** Prof. Moglen,

I'm beginning to think that the comparisons to the no-fault auto-insurance and the military draft are just too weak to really provide much meaningful discussion. I think the notion that affirmative action may actually provide efficiency gains is very interesting, but I am struggling to find where that would fit. No-fault auto-insurance is one of the only programs I'm familiar with that disregards individual responsibility in favor of efficiency. Can you suggest some other areas that might be more analogous? Alternatively, if these analogies are just too far from equal protection jurisprudence to be useful, do you think that an investigation into efficiency in relation to narrow tailoring would be fruitful?

 \ No newline at end of file

Revision 4r4 - 18 Jun 2012 - 20:14:08 - AlexWang
Revision 3r3 - 30 May 2012 - 05:11:36 - AlexWang
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
Syndicate this site RSSATOM