In a country where racial discrimination is supposed to be illegal, can you go ahead and discriminate on the basis of race if you want to so long as the victims of said discrimination are white and Asian?
This question seems crystal clear, and one of those questions that answers itself. But all the legal scholars and all the wise men and wise women in our extravagantly expensive legal industry can’t seem to parse this one. The U.S. Supreme Court has once again punted on a question that wouldn’t appear to offer any difficulties to a first-year law student.
This sort of legal nonfeasance and political bobbing and weaving breeds cynicism and goes a long way toward explaining why the law and its various practitioners don’t get much respect. And why should they? If the law says, as it plainly does, that it’s illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, then why isn’t discrimination on the basis of race illegal? You would have to be a highly-trained legal scholar to assert that affirmative action is a cure for discrimination, rather than what it obviously is, just another form of it.
It’s often said of law school that it sharpens the mind by narrowing its focus. Hmmm. Sometimes I wonder. It appears in just as many cases law school teaches one to make the simple complicated.
