Show simple item record

dc.contributor.authorDriver, Justin
dc.date.accessioned2024-08-07T18:58:02Z
dc.date.available2024-08-07T18:58:02Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.identifier.citationJustin Driver, The strange career of antisubordination, 91 UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW REVIEW 651 (2024).en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/18430
dc.description.abstractConstitutional scholars have long construed the Equal Protection Clause as containing two dueling visions: anticlassification and antisubordination. Scholars advancing the first view contend that the Clause prohibits the government from racially classifying people. But scholars promoting the second view argue that racial classifications are permissible--provided that the government does not engage in racial subjugation. On no issue have these competing perspectives clashed more intensely than affirmative action. Where the anticlassification view deems those policies unconstitutional for exhibiting race consciousness, the antisubordination view finds them permissible because they do not racially subjugate anyone. Conventional antisubordination scholars portray the concept's support for affirmative action as one part of its larger intellectual program that inexorably champions racial egalitarianism. This Article challenges that conventional account by demonstrating that antisubordination's career has been far more protean, complex, and--above all--strange than scholars typically allow. Some of the most reviled opinions in Supreme Court history were predicated upon antisubordination rhetoric, as that concept has been used both to challenge and to maintain racist regimes. Legal luminaries from across the ideological spectrum, moreover, have often contended that affirmative action marks Black and brown people as substandard. Indeed, it is impossible to understand last Term's decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College without foregrounding antisubordination's multiplicity. That decision introduced "antisubordination" into the U.S. Reports, reframed how affirmative action subjugates racial minorities, and witnessed the Justices talking past each other by wielding the concept in divergent fashions. Grappling with antisubordination's complexity remains urgent today because the theory has been exported to an ever-growing, astonishingly diverse array of legal domains. This Article contends neither that antisubordination must be abandoned nor that affirmative action should have been invalidated. To the contrary, it explores arguments designed to shore up antisubordination and to provide alternate grounds for affirmative action's constitutionality. It will no longer do, however, simply to ignore antisubordination's considerable complexity. By tracing the winding, peculiar path of antisubordination, this Article not only recasts Justice Clarence Thomas's much-debated jurisprudence but also clarifies our nation's garbled constitutional discourse.en_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Chicago Law Reviewen_US
dc.subjectEqual rights; Racial classification; Social policy; Unconstitutional conditions doctrine (Law); Social justiceen_US
dc.titleThe Strange Career of Antisubordinationen_US
rioxxterms.versionNAen_US
rioxxterms.typeJournal Article/Reviewen_US
refterms.dateFOA2024-08-07T18:58:03Z
refterms.dateFirstOnline2024


Files in this item

Thumbnail
Name:
The Strange Career of Antisubo ...
Size:
1.196Mb
Format:
PDF

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record