As of Oct. 3, the Supreme Court is back in session with a new slate of highly consequential cases on its docket. To better understand what is at stake, Northwestern Now spoke with faculty to learn what cases they are following and what the ramifications are likely to be.
In affirmative action cases brought by a group called Students for Fair Admissions against two universities, the plaintiffs are arguing that race-conscious admissions policies — which they claim lead to discrimination against Asian and/or white applicants — are unlawful because they conflict with provisions of the Civil Rights Act and/or the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
According to Kate Masur, the Board of Visitors Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences: “The 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified in 1868. As a historian of Reconstruction, I know that [the plaintiffs’] portrayal of the Amendment’s framers is incorrect, and I helped write an amicus brief that makes that case. The legislators who passed the 14th Amendment adopted a variety of race-conscious policies, including the nation’s first federal civil rights statute, which sought to ensure that citizens of ‘every race or color’ had the same civil rights as ‘white citizens.’ These men knew that white people had heretofore enjoyed legal advantages and sought to remedy that with a race-conscious law that is still part of our federal code.”
Masur (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2001) specializes in the history of race, politics, and law in the nineteenth-century United States. She is the author of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (W. W. Norton, 2021) and numerous other books and articles including An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press, 2010), and, with Gregory Downs, The World the Civil War Made (UNC Press, 2015).
Continue reading in Northwestern Now’s article, “New Supreme Court term could deliver ‘bigger bombshell’ than Roe overturn.”