A Comment on \u3cem\u3eGrutter\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eGratz v. Bollinger\u3c/em\u3e

Now that the Supreme Court has definitively resolved (at least for a generation) the issue of the constitutionality of affirmative action in American higher education, thereby continuing without major adjustment what has been the practice in our selective colleges and universities for more or less the last thirty years, it is easy to forget how different the United States would have looked in the years ahead if only one vote had shifted to the dissenting side. Just how precipitous and long-lasting the decline in racial and ethnic diversity would have been is a complicated matter, but that it would have been significant is, I think, indisputable