The year was 1969 and American colleges and universities were just starting to feel the pressure to give preferential treatment to students from underrepresented groups in admissions. Just a few years earlier, President Lyndon Johnson had declared that it wasn’t good enough just to stop discrimination against black students, with the analogy to a race where some participants had long suffered under a handicap.
Schools shouldn’t just treat all applicants equally, Johnson argued, but should instead favor those from groups that had previously been held back. Thus, racial preferences were both just and necessary.
One of the first schools to adopt a policy of favoring black applicants was Yale Law School. The announcement of that policy led a Yale Law alumnus, California appeals court judge Macklin Fleming, to write to the law school’s dean and express his misgivings. (The full text of Judge Fleming’s letter and Dean Pollack’s reply is available here.)
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