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Against the backdrop of today's increasingly multicultural society, are America's elite colleges admitting and successfully educating a diverse student body? No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal pulls back the curtain on the selective college experience and takes a rigorous and comprehensive look at how race and social class impact each stage--from application and admission, to enrollment and student life on campus. Arguing that elite higher education contributes to both social mobility and inequality, the authors investigate such areas as admission advantages for minorities, academic achievement gaps tied to race and class, unequal burdens in paying for tuition, and satisfaction with college experiences. The book's analysis is based on data provided by the National Survey of College Experience, collected from more than nine thousand students who applied to one of ten selective colleges between the early 1980s and late 1990s. The authors explore the composition of applicant pools, factoring in background and \"selective admission enhancement strategies\"--including AP classes, test-prep courses, and extracurriculars--to assess how these strengthen applications. On campus, the authors examine roommate choices, friendship circles, and degrees of social interaction, and discover that while students from different racial and class circumstances are not separate in college, they do not mix as much as one might expect. The book encourages greater interaction among student groups and calls on educational institutions to improve access for students of lower socioeconomic status.

What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval of audiences important to them. The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and policy goals. In contrast, Baum argues that the influence of judges' audiences is pervasive. This influence derives from judges' interest in popularity and respect, a motivation central to most people. Judges care about the regard of audiences because they like that regard in itself, not just as a means to other ends. Judges and Their Audiences uses research in social psychology to make the case that audiences shape judges' choices in substantial ways. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on judicial decision-making and an array of empirical evidence, the book then analyzes the potential and actual impact of several audiences, including the public, other branches of government, court colleagues, the legal profession, and judges' social peers.

I argue that enrollment of a diverse student body is but a pragmatic first step toward the broader social goal of inclusion and ask whether motives for campus diversification are aligned with pedagogic goals. I address this question by focusing on inclusion, namely, organizational strategies and practices that promote meaningful social and academic interactions among students who differ in their experiences, views, and traits. After illustrating the contours and pace of diversification, I discuss challenges to achieving meaningful integration as campuses become more racially diverse by focusing on ethnic programming and evidence about students' social interaction patterns. Integration is not an automatic by-product of campus diversity; therefore, to harness the benefits of diverse student bodies, institutional leaders must pursue deliberate strategies that promote inclusion.

Through an analysis of relevant social science evidence, this article provides a deeper understanding of critical mass, a concept that has become central in litigation efforts related to affirmative action admissions policies that seek to further the educational benefits of diversity. We demonstrate that the concept of critical mass requires an understanding of the conditions needed for meaningful interactions and participation among students, given the particular institutional context. To highlight this contextual definition of critical mass and to avoid further obfuscations in the legal debate, we offer the term dynamic diversity and outline four main components of dynamic diversity that institutions can attend to. By thinking of dynamic diversity as the goal, institutions and lawyers should be better poised to answer the question of how much diversity is necessary for leveraging its educational benefits.

How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors? The Constrained Court combines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court. Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman show how two types of constraints have influenced the decision making of the modern Court. First, Bailey and Maltzman document that important legal doctrines, such as respect for precedents, have influenced every justice since 1950. The authors find considerable variation in how these doctrines affect each justice, variation due in part to the differing experiences justices have brought to the bench. Second, Bailey and Maltzman show that justices are constrained by political factors. Justices are not isolated from what happens in the legislative and executive branches, and instead respond in predictable ways to changes in the preferences of Congress and the president. The Constrained Court shatters the myth that justices are unconstrained actors who pursue their personal policy preferences at all costs. By showing how law and politics interact in the construction of American law, this book sheds new light on the unique role that the Supreme Court plays in the constitutional order.

We use the Critical Race Theory frameworks of interest convergence and divergence to critique the anti-affirmative action movement's co-option of Asian Americans. Past discussions of affirmative action and Asian Americans mainly concentrate on how Asian Americans are affected by affirmative action, whether positively or negatively. We demonstrate how Asian American collegiate experiences ought to affect public understanding of affirmative action itself by demonstrating the need for broader conceptualizations of meritocracy and critical mass.

What role should racial difference play in the American workplace? As a nation, we rely on civil rights law to address this question, and the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemingly answered it: race must not be a factor in workplace decisions. InAfter Civil Rights, John Skrentny contends that after decades of mass immigration, many employers, Democratic and Republican political leaders, and advocates have adopted a new strategy to manage race and work. Race is now relevant not only in negative cases of discrimination, but in more positive ways as well. In today's workplace, employers routinely practice \"racial realism,\" where they view race as real--as a job qualification. Many believe employee racial differences, and sometimes immigrant status, correspond to unique abilities or evoke desirable reactions from clients or citizens. They also see racial diversity as a way to increase workplace dynamism. The problem is that when employers see race as useful for organizational effectiveness, they are often in violation of civil rights law. After Civil Rightsexamines this emerging strategy in a wide range of employment situations, including the low-skilled sector, professional and white-collar jobs, and entertainment and media. In this important book, Skrentny urges us to acknowledge the racial realism already occurring, and lays out a series of reforms that, if enacted, would bring the law and lived experience more in line, yet still remain respectful of the need to protect the civil rights of all workers.

Guided by a bottom-up policy implementation framework, this study draws from semi-structured interviews of 14 campus-level administrators charged with implementing diversity policy at the University of Michigan to investigate how an affirmative action ban (Proposal 2) influenced their efforts in support of racial/ethnic diversity at the university. Our findings show that beyond contributing to declines in student body diversity, laws like Proposal 2 have negatively influenced work critical to the success of students of color on campus. The findings suggest institutions operating in an anti–affirmative action context would benefit from proactive policies and practices that empower administrators in legally restrictive environments and support conversation and action that directly address the ways race continues to matter on college campuses.

Diversity today is considered central to the capacity of postsecondary institutions to thrive in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society. However, as universities take steps to reap the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity, legal decisions and state laws increasingly restrict the tools these institutions have historically implemented to further this goal. This article provides an overview of these legal and public policy developments and considers their implications for future policies aimed at achieving racial and ethnic diversity in graduate studies. The author emphasizes the need for institutions to reframe the ways concepts of diversity, equity, and quality are perceived and enacted through admissions policies.

Affirmative action in college admissions was effectively banned in Texas by the Hopwood ruling in 1997, by voter referenda in California and Washington in 1996 and 1998, and by administrative decisions in Florida in 1999. The Hopwood and Johnson rulings also had possible applicability to public colleges throughout Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Supreme Court's 2003 decision in the Grutter and Gratz cases reaffirmed but limited the legal basis for affirmative action in colleges. This article uses nationally representative data on the admissions decisions of high school students in 1992 and 2004 to estimate the magnitude of the change in affirmative action in college admission decisions (i.e., how these policy changes affected the relative likelihood of admission of minority and nonminority applicants). We find substantial declines in levels of affirmative action practiced by highly selective colleges in the states affected by bans and the Hopwood and Johnson rulings, and no evidence of declines outside these states (and thus modest and generally insignificant declines nationwide). We show how the decline in affirmative action in these particular states affects not only students in these states but also those students who live in adjacent states, particularly when the adjacent states lack highly selective colleges.