A Cultural Pluralist Case for Affirmative Action in Legal Academia

Abstract

This Article is about affirmative action in legal academia.It argues for a large expansion of our current commitment to cultural diversity on the ground that law schools are political institutions.For that reason, they should abide by the general democratic principle that people should be represented in institutions that have power over their lives.Further, large scale affirmative action would improve the quality and increase the value of legal scholarship.My goal is to develop in the specific context of law school affirmative action the conception of "race consciousness" that Gary Peller describes and advocates in his essay in this issue of the Duke Law Journal.I We need to be able to talk about the political and cultural relations of the various groups that compose our society without falling into racialism, essentialism, or a concept of the "nation" tied to the idea of sovereignty.We need to conceptualize groups in a "post-modem" way, 2 recognizing their reality in our lives without losing sight of the partial, unstable, contradictory character of group existence.I present my argument in the form of a dialogue with our society's dominant way of understanding race and merit in academia, which I call "colorblind meritocratic fundamentalism.