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1-1-1984
Minority Access to Higher Education in the PostBakke Era
Drew S. Days III
Yale Law School
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Days, Drew S. III, "Minority Access to Higher Education in the Post-Bakke Era" (1984). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 1490.
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1490
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MINORITY ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION
IN THE POST-BAKKE ERA
DREW
S.
DAYS,
III
Almost six years have passed since the Supreme Court's decision in the Regents of the University of California v. Allan Bakke. l
The flood of legal commentaries, analyses, media reports and studies
of that decision and its effects has been second only to that preceding
its announcement. s Yet one is hard-pressed to arrive at any confident
conclusions about the impact of that ruling upon minority admission
to higher education.
Since the facts and the contours of the Supreme Court decision
in Bakke are generally familiar, let me briefly highlight just a few
points with respect to the case. Allan Bakke, a white medical school
applicant, was denied admission to the University of California at
Davis Medical School. He sued in state court, asserting that his rejection had been caused by the existence of a minority admissions
program at Davis that set aside a fixed number of places in the entering class for which only minorities could compete. A lower court
held that the Davis admissions program was unconstitutional but de- 0
elined to order Allan Bakke's admission. The California Supreme
Court sustained the former holding but reversed the latter. It held
that the Davis program was indeed unconstitutional and Allan
Bakke must be admitted. s
The United States Supreme Court accepted the case for review
upon petition of the Regents. By different 5-4 alignments, it held,
first, that to the extent that the California Supreme Court's ruling
1. 438 U.S. 265 (1978).
2. Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke makes reference to a representative sample of the
scores of scholarly articles on the subject of affirmative action in higher education, [d. at 288
n.25. After that opinion, scholars have continued to find the topic challenging from both constitutionallaw and public policy perspectives. See, for examples of writing shortly after Bakke:
A Symposium: Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 61 CALIF. L. REV. I (1919);
Calabresi, Bakke as Pseudo-Tragedy, 28 CATH. U. L. REV. 421 (1979); Karst & Horowitz,
The Bakke Opinions and Equal Protection Doctrine, 14 HARV. C.R.-C.L. L. REV. 1 (1919);
Lesnick, What Does Bakke Require of lAw Schools, 128 U. PA. L. REV. 141 (1919); Stone,
Equal Protection in Special Admissions Programs: Forward From Bakke, 6 HASTINGS
CONST. L.Q. 119 (1919); and Note, The Supreme Court. 1977 Term. Constitutional lAw, 92
HARV. L. REV. 51, 131 (1918).
3. Bakke v. Regents of Univ. of California, 18 Cal. 3d 34, 553 P.2d 1152 (1916).
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